Uncatalogued: The Case of Oil Street Artist Village
Visual Arts
Description
Description
In 2006, a member of Hong Kong’s artist community came into Asia Art Archive’s library before departing the city, and in haste, deposited a box of material related to Oil Street. Kept in AAA’s Special Collections room until 2011, the box was recently rediscovered to reveal a range of material around the Oil Street artist village and the ensuing ‘Save Oil Street Campaign’, which took place in the late 1990s.
Oil Street’s is a history built as much on gaps as on record and nostalgically lives on in the memory of the community as an important moment in the city’s cultural development—as an instance that allowed artists and organisations to engage in unconstrained experiments with large space at a low rent and as a precursor for the art community’s increasing engagement in attempts to safeguard cultural space in Hong Kong.
For AAA, the box represents an entry point through which to read and reinterpret a history as well as an opportunity to expose the complexities and ambiguities of the research process. With existing documentation, news clippings, letters, drawings, and photographs, and through conversations with members of the artist village, AAA reconstructs parallel timelines of the history of the site (1908 – present) and that of the artist village (1998 – 2000). AAA looks to playfully reflect on the subjectivity of memory through a series of new drawings of the site, and invites a wider interpretation of the material with talks by New York-based artist Paul Chan and local storyteller Uncle Hung Jai.
Info
Indoor