The development plan of West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD) was officially approved by the HKSAR Executive Council in January2013. By end June, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) made a decision on the building team and design plan of M+. The building of Xiqu Centre has been scheduled to commence in September. With the kicking-off of various construction works, WKCDA announced a series of income-generation and cost-saving initiatives to tackle the problem of over-budgeted construction cost. Meanwhile, M+ presented art events of diversified nature with the objective of enhancing the community’s knowledge of the Museum through participation.

Two perhaps idiosyncratic perplexities have motivated this essay. First, if the process of normalizing the “international” as a good has simultaneously rendered questions about it silent, would this not be precisely the reason for calling the questions alive? For as circumstances change, obsolescence might return to relevance. Second, given that the “international” as a good has been understood with the grammar of use (that is, the benefits the good brings as a consequence of choosing it), with a pervasiveness and an eloquence that spread way beyond art, is it not equally important to ask what limits there are to this grammar, just in case that there is something it cannot exhaust? Would understanding the “international” with the language of the good yield not just the obvious, but the compelling (for this is what the good does to us – it compels us to act in its favor)?I need to quickly qualify that I have no intention of defining the “international” in this essay, although my thinking on the idea did arise in the specific, relatively well-defined context of the policy change in 2012 of the institutional model of Hong Kong’s participation in the Venice Biennale . Given that Hong Kong’s participation in the Venice Biennale is an international project from Hong Kong, I am interested in asking two questions. What is the biennale as an international institution for the production and distribution of art and what is regarded as good practice now? (That is, what are we participating in or getting ourselves into?) Since many circumstances in art and the larger society have changed (drastically even) in the past three years, what is good about the “international” for artists and curators now? (That is, what other kinds of imagination and experiences of the international are valued on top of the particular international circulated in official rhetoric that Hong Kong’s participation in the Venice Biennale promises?)

By probing into controversial judgments made by the Obscene Article Tribunal of HKSAR government on erotic/ borderline artworks, this essay examines the development of this particular art subject, as well as difficulties it has encountered insofar in Hong Kong. Erotic/ borderline content in art-making is never a recent phenomenon. By tracing back to early 1900s, we aim to manifest, by a chronological approach, the appreciation of erotic/ borderline art is closely related to Hong Kong’s socio-cultural context. We would also show in cases that pornography in popular culture was once and has still been wrapped in the packing of “art”, and try to explain how the abundance pool of erotic/ sex-related materials in popular culture mold the sexual attitude of most ordinary citizens of Hong Kong, which unavoidably affects their perception of erotic/ borderline content in contemporary art.

The history of Chinese art has come through thousands of years. Archeological finds of ceramics, bronze and jade wares, paintings, calligraphy and seal carving have constructed a hallway of artworks that echoes the ancient and the present, in which one builds dialogs with one’s ancestors and gets a glimpse of the wisdom and civilization of the Chinese people. Tertiary art education in Hong Kong could be traced back to the 1950s when the teaching and research of Chinese art history flowed like a stream of spring water into the so-called “cultural desert”. Courses on Chinese art history offered in local tertiary institutions and indigenous research blossomed after the Millennium, conjointly writing the chapters of the history of art and culture. As a receiver and beneficiary of Hong Kong tertiary art education, I would like to sort through and systematically present the courses and research of Chinese art history in the last few decades in Hong Kong, and report the findings in this essay, to express personal gratitude to the pioneers who have paved the way for young dreamers, including myself, who are committed to the pursuit of art.

Established in 1995, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (ADC) has been charged with the distribution of arts funding for twenty years. This report looks into the allocation of resources to visual arts against other art forms, and among various sub-categories among the visual arts, from 2000 to 2013. The data in this report dates from 2000 when the funding model and administrative structure were restructured into the primitive version that we see today. While HKADC’s funding system classifies projects and arts groups into ten major categories for funding support, a new categorization has been applied in this study, with the aim to provide a more accurate focus on resources allocation across the various art forms between the grant years 2000/2001 and 2013/2014.

2014 continued to be a year of financial pressure for the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) while it progressed towards its goals of partially-opening in 2017. At the beginning of the year, with the objectives of increasing income and reducing expenditure, WKCDA suggested raising the plot ratio to accommodate bigger floor area, and implementing hire-freeze. Capital available to the WKCDA would only cover the construction of phases 1 and 2 facilities. When inquired about the status of the 3rd phase construction, Carrie Lam, Chief Secretary for Administration, said that it would be a waste of resources to construct such facilities should the cultural standard of Hong Kong remained to be sub-optimal. Her remarks induced aggravation from the local cultural sector. The delay of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link (XRL) construction has impacted the date for the MTR Corporation to return the borrowed land to WKCDA, which in turn pushes back the construction schedule of the West Kowloon Cultural District (the District). In February 2015, Michael Lynch, Chief Executive Officer, tendered his resignation. Lynch would leave the post from August 3, 2015.

On August 31, 2014, the NPCSC announced its decision on the methods for selecting the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2017. The Hong Kong Federation of Students, with the objective of pressuring for constitutional reform, lobbied and brought about a week-long Student Strike in September, 2014. On the evening of September 26 when the Strike finished, a group of students and Hong Kong citizens forcefully entered the “Civic Square” (the Square) of the Tamar Central Government Offices. The Police arrested some of them. Tai Yiu-ting Benny, one of the convenors of the “Occupy Central” movement, announced in the wee hours of September 28 the kick-off of “Occupy Central”. In the afternoon that followed, a large amount of Hong Kong citizens went to Admiralty, trying to join the “Occupy Central” convocation but were trapped when the Police blocked the trunk roads of the area. The citizens required the Police to unblock the roads, resulting in major clashes. The Police broke up the gathering with tear bombs but people quickly came back once the gas cleared. From then on, Hong Kong citizens occupied the roads of Admiralty, Mongkok and Causeway Bay for over 70 days. The incident was later named “Umbrella Movement.” During the Movement, a large amount of original visual objects were seen in the three “occupation areas” at Admiralty, Mongkok, and Causeway Bay. In the meantime, many local artists responded to the Movement with artworks, a practice which extended to beyond the clearance of the occupation areas. In this section, information on such visual objects is presented.

Recently many exhibitions in Hong Kong are concerned with “socially-engaged art” / community art and it appears that some people are trying to be part of the trend. However, the discussion on the subject falls far short of its practice. The problematics of touching the community / practicing community art, such as “whose community is it?”, participation, ethics of practice, aesthetic forms, intervention effects, and the in-depth discussions of those questions are disproportionately scarce. Accordingly, this essay traces and focuses on the development of “community art” in Hong Kong since the 1990s, including the struggle between the Government’s policies and resources, the exploration and practices of various artists and groups, and changes in the social atmosphere, in the hope of a more advanced understanding of the practice of community art.

To make sense of the history of video art of a place, such as Hong Kong, one must begin to allow apparently unrelated human purposes, courses of events, institutional histories, incidents and accidents, personal calling, as well as desires that precede and surround the popularization of a named practice, to shed light on this single medium and its players. This latter position embraces the wisdom of media archaeology, enriched by Bruno Latour’s call for the study of shared agencies between humans and artifacts integrated into the same framework, and finds wholesome integration in Bernard Stiegler’s view of organology. While contextual factors may have determined a lot of what happened, in most media history studies, we are not always ready to come face to face with the fact that the inner logic of a medium, especially how the tool itself affords practice, could have driven certain directions of development more than we have understood simply because we leave it out of our investigation. I shall open myself to consider as many of these issues as possible: tracking down institutional provisions, processes, artists and their facilitators, the disparate but abundant locations where video art activities were realized and made visible, and what has been left out, so as to generate a tentative portrait of video art in Hong Kong, in contrast with other regions.

The writer points out at the beginning of the essay that the creation and perception of art have always revolved around our seeing and hearing faculties, and that touch art is rarely thought of. It was often associated with the blind or the visually-impaired when it first appeared and is used as an exhibition theme. The essay then mentions organizations that promote touch art (for example “Arts with the Disabled Association Hong Kong” and the Parent Resource Centre of the “Hong Kong Society for the Blind”) and collates the multiple meanings of organizing touch art activities. The writer introduces the exhibits of the “Third Hong Kong Touch Art Festival”, and discusses the aesthetics of touch art, with examples including the artworks by Chng Seok Tin, who became blind later in life, and the world of touch for those born blind.