Author's Statement

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, as well as 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 collectors. 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 own 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 non-profit local exhibitions on ethnic minorities of color: Still Lives: Art by Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong (1990), Being Minorities — Contemporary Asian Art (1997), C.A.R.E.: Local Vietnamese Community Art Re-encountered (2008), Afterwork (2016), A Collective Present (2017), Beyond Myself (2018), We Are Like Air (2018) and Nàng Tự Do: The Archive of “Art In the Camps” (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 either about Vietnamese refugees or foreign 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 under the Art in the Camps program organized by Garden Streams — Hong Kong Fellowship of Christian Artists, which ran from 1988 to 1991 at Whitehead Detention Camp.[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 but it could also reflect its tendency to forget them so quickly that it constantly needs their reiteration. Exhibitions about Art in the Camps are concentrated within one or two years before disappearing into invisibility until it reemerges yet again as a topic of interest in the next decade, effectively making Vietnamese refugee art history in Hong Kong circular and lacking in stable development due to its constant repetition.