Art, Migration, and Representation

Disclaimer

While we read and review the Time Capsules vigorously, the student projects have yet to be fact-checked in their totality. We are sharing them openly as they are with the intention of building different thresholds from which others may discover new ideas for future research or build on existing explorations. We welcome your feedback, dialogue, and discussion.

Date

This project was originally published in August 2020. Last updated May 2025.

Hong Kong is a product of human movement. It is a city built, cultivated, and developed by migrants and it continues to rest on their labor. This project looks at Hong Kong art through the lens of migration. Exhibition history is presented in parallel with the history of Indian sailors, Gurkhas, African businessmen, Vietnamese refugees, Southeast Asian migrant workers, and other non-Chinese Hong Kongers in the city. The result is a juxtaposition that shows the impermeability of Hong Kong art to its non-Chinese communities of color and provokes dialogue about the invisibility of ethnic minorities from the Global South in the making of Hong Kong culture. The causes of this absence lie in discourses on ethnicity, privilege, labor, and mobility. Decisive factors include colonial privileges that benefited Euro-American Caucasian communities; restricted access to education, employment, and community support for non-Cantonese speakers; migration policies imposed on migrant workers, asylum seekers, and refugees; and the elitism of Hong Kong’s art world.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] These have all played a part in the invisibility of minorities in Hong Kong culture, not merely as artists, but as curators, researchers, scholars, critics, and other cultural workers. This project centralizes communities that have been written in the margins to encourage us to reflect on the barriers that have placed them there, whether those barriers exist in our institutions, through our policies, or within our collective ideologies. It is a recognition that minority art histories are Hong Kong art history and our understanding of Hong Kong art and Hong Kong would not be complete without them.

Between 1933 and 2020, there were eight curated, non-commercial, local exhibitions featuring work by or about ethnic minorities of color: “Still Lives: Art by Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong” (Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1990), “Being Minorities — Contemporary Asian Art” (Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1997), “C.A.R.E.: Local Vietnamese Community Art Re-encountered” (Lingnan University, 2008), “Afterwork” (Para Site, 2016), “A Collective Present” (Spring Workshop, 2017), “Beyond Myself” (The Hive Spring, 2018), “We Are Like Air” (Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2018) and “Nàng Tự Do: The Archive of ‘Art In the Camps’” (The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library, 2020). While “Being Minorities” was curated as a reflection on the further displacement of ethnic minorities during the Handover in 1997, the remaining seven exhibitions were focused either on Vietnamese refugees or migrant domestic workers.[6]

“Still Lives”, “C.A.R.E.,” and “Nàng Tự Do” were exhibitions of the same body of work created by Vietnamese refugees at Whitehead Detention Centre under the Art in the Camps program organized by Garden Streams — Hong Kong Fellowship of Christian Artists, which ran from 1988 to 1991 at numerous detention centers across Hong Kong.[7] This enduring reemergence of the art by Vietnamese refugees at Whitehead suggests the city’s particular interest in this specific history and minority community, or could it also reflect Hong Kong’s tendency to forget them so quickly that it constantly needs their reiteration? Exhibitions drawn from Art in the Camps are concentrated within one or two years before disappearing into invisibility until they reemerge in the next decade, effectively making Vietnamese refugee art history in Hong Kong circular and lacking in stable development due to its constant repetition.

The interest and research in migrant domestic workers has a different trajectory. Exhibitions focused on MDWs have steadily grown since the 2010s. One could identify Para Site’s major group exhibition, “Afterwork,” as the landmark show that increased interest in the MDW community. It sought to explore “issues of class, race, labor and migration in Hong Kong, its surrounding region and beyond” by showing artists whose work has been a part of, related to, or driven by migrant domestic labor.[8] Yet, as ground-breaking as the exhibition was, it only showed one Hong Kong ethnic minority artist of color, the Philippines-born photographer Xyza Cruz Bacani, among 30 artists and art collectives exhibited. Bacani’s singularity as an artist representing her community in an exhibition of “Afterwork”’s scale illustrates the scarcity of minority makers in Hong Kong and further attests to the art world’s impermeability to certain communities.

In an interview with Bacani conducted in November 2020 for this project, we discussed her experience as an ethnic minority maker in Hong Kong, from her background as a migrant worker to her emergence as a professional photographer following a feature by The New York Times in 2014 and her solo exhibition “We Are Like Air” in 2018.[9] While she cited socio-economic status and Cantonese proficiency as defining hurdles for minority communities to become cultural makers in the city and shared the importance of meeting the right people in her success, we also talked about the language the media has used to talk about her accomplishments.[10] Despite being a full-time photographer for years, articles have continuously stressed Bacani’s previous employment as a migrant domestic worker in their headlines. Bacani theorized that the emphasis on her background is partially due to the exoticizing and tokenistic allure of a “rags to riches” story but it also reflects the writers’, and perhaps the greater public’s, need to apply repetition to convince themselves that a Southeast Asian woman and a former migrant domestic worker, could attain success as a Hong Kong artist.[11] It is almost as if that feat is impossible as the systems in place were not built to grant someone like Bacani such an accomplishment.

The circularity and repetition of minority histories shown in exhibitions, the lack of minority makers, and the bewildered response to Bacani’s success point towards a system unsure of how to include minorities in its canon. Exhibitions like “Afterwork,” though their motivations and effects are largely positive, exemplify how the ethnic minority is recognized as art’s subject but not its maker. We are embodied by the ceramic bottles of shampoo in Joyce Lung’s Susan (2016), the pixelated videotapes in Elvis Yip Kin Bon’s If You Miss Home (2016), the toy grenades in Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Hong Kong Intervention (2009), but we cannot be the gears that push the field forward.[12] Our representation rests on the shoulders of one in seven million artists like Bacani, with which we should be content.

I was the only Filipino-Hong Konger Art History graduate in my class and I am now the only Filipino-Hong Konger in my museum’s Curatorial Department. While one person alone could initiate ripples, she cannot make waves. Without ethnic minority presence across the sector, both as artists and as decision-makers within our institutions, Hong Kong art will remain exclusionary regardless of how many exhibitions about us are shown. It will stay impermeable not only to ethnic minorities of color but to most at the socio-economic margins who cannot attain the field’s prerequisites of higher education, time, and capital. This project is a reminder that we are all migrants to this city and we should all have a voice in its culture and history, regardless of where we come from and where we go next.

[1] Kam-Yee Law and Kim-Ming Lee, “The myth of multiculturalism in ‘Asia’s world city’: incomprehensive policies for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong,” Journal of Asian Public Policy 5, no. 1 (2012): 120-125;128-130, doi: 10.1080/17516234.2012.662353. 

[2] Kelvin Chi-Kin Cheung and Kee-Lee Chou, “Child Poverty Among Hong Kong Ethnic Minorities,” Social Indicators Research 137, no. 1 (2018): 95.

[3] Michael Ramsden and Luke Marsh, “The ‘right to Work’ of Refugees in Hong Kong: MA v Director of Immigration,” International Journal of Refugee Law 25, no. 3 (2013): 574.

[4] “Immigration Ordinance, Hong Kong, Section 13 (1981),” Hong Kong e-Legislation, accessed 25 March 2025, https://www.elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap115?xpid=ID_1438402608535_003.

[5] “Immigration Ordinance, Hong Kong, Section 2(4)(a)(vi) (1997),” Hong Kong e-Legislation, accessed 25 March 2025, https://www.elegislation.gov.hk/hk/cap115?xpid=ID_1438402608535_003. 

[6] Oscar Ho, Being Minorities — Contemporary Asian Art Invitation, Hong Kong Art History Research Project, Asia Art Archive, first published 1997, https://aaa.org.hk/archive/2182.  

[7] Sophia Suk-Mun Law, The Invisible Citizens of Hong Kong: Art and Stories of Vietnamese Boatpeople (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2014), xiv-xv. 

[8] “Afterwork,” Exhibitions, Para Site, accessed 25 March 2025, https://www.para-site.art/exhibitions/afterwork/. 

[9] Xyza Cruz Bacani (artist), interview with author, 22 November 2020. Edited for clarity.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid. 

[12] Para Site, “Afterwork.” 

Bibliography

Cheung, Kelvin Chi-Kin, and Kee-Lee Chou. “Child Poverty Among Hong Kong Ethnic Minorities.” Social Indicators Research 137, no. 1 (2018): 93–112. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48715840.

Choi, Susanne Y. P., and Eric Fong, eds. Migration in Post-Colonial Hong Kong. 1st ed. London: Routledge, 2017. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315466699. 

Erni, John Nguyet, and Lisa Yuk-ming Leung. Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong. 1st ed. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt14jxs35.

Ho, Oscar. Being Minorities — Contemporary Asian Art Invitation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 1997. https://aaa.org.hk/archive/2182.

Law, Kam-Yee, and Kim-Ming Lee. “The Myth of Multiculturalism in ‘Asia’s World City’: Incomprehensive Policies for Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong.” Journal of Asian Public Policy 5, no. 1 (2012): 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/17516234.2012.662353. 

Law, Sophia Suk-Mun. The Invisible Citizens of Hong Kong: Art and Stories of Vietnamese Boatpeople. Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2014.

Mathews, Gordon. “Asylum Seekers as Symbols of Hong Kong’s Non-Chineseness.” China Perspectives 2018, no. 3 (2018): 51–58. https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.8132. 

O’Connor, Paul. Islam in Hong Kong: Muslims and Everyday Life in China’s World City. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xwd8h.

Chou, Freya, Cosmin Costinas, Inti Guerrero, and Qinyi Lim. Afterwork. Hong Kong: Para Site, 2016. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at Para Site, Hong Kong, 19 March 2016–29 May 2016. 

Ramsden, Michael, and Luke Marsh. “The ‘right to Work’ of Refugees in Hong Kong: MA v Director of Immigration.” International Journal of Refugee Law 25, no. 3 (2013): 574–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eet036. 

Nicole M. Nepomuceno was a participant in the Hong Kong Art Workshop, a class of the Department of Art History at The University of Hong Kong in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, in 2020.