The Rise and Fall of Hong Kong’s Artists’ Villages: A Virtual Interview in a Parallel Universe

With the so-called “artists villages” (more explanation on the “so-called” later) swirling around my head, I put my fingers to the keyboard and the characters “witch doctors” came out.

The witch doctors of the Mentawai Islands, west of Sumatra in Indonesia, were reported to be surprisingly effective in curing people who suffering from diarrhea. Their magical formula was to have the sufferers lie face down near the edge of a cliff and lick the ground from time to time. Past experience told the witch doctors that it was “mostly effective”, though they weren’t sure of the “why”. Later it was found that the soil on the cliffs contained kaolin, the white clay commonly used in some of modern diarrhea medicines. Once the reason is determined, a medicine can be made and trying luck with licking tongues will be history.

In order for things to be repeated, represented and duplicated, one has to strip them down to their origins in the way pure historical documentation will be translated into pragmatic purposes: find the real catalyst, get a firm grasp of it and its occurrence can be repeated with precision. But what if it involves the human factor? And what if one has to take into account the additional element of “cultural policies”?