Visual arts, dance, theatre: Multimedia performance and contemporary Hong Kong art

Abstract

This article takes as its focus multimedia performance in Hong Kong in the 1980s, a period which saw high levels of collaboration across the visual arts, dance and theatre. The significance of these cross-media fertilizations to the development of contemporary Hong Kong art is drawn out in discussion of two artists, Josh Hon (b. 1954) and Choi Yan Chi (b. 1949), whose respective encounters with experimental dance and theatre subsequent to their return from higher education in Europe and North America made them newly sensitive to elements of time, space and movement. The subsequent appropriation of these materials of contingency into experiments with performance, installation and painting produced aesthetic strategies by which the artwork could be made porous to its local context. The significance of these exchanges is that they point to an alternative point of origin for processes of localization integral to the emergence of contemporary art in Hong Kong which typically has been bound to major political inflection points and a concomitant local cultural introspection. Attending to the substantive and diverse transnational connections of artists, these developments are instead indexed against international art historical and intellectual shifts beginning in the 1960s away from universalism and interiority and towards relativity, contingency, fragmentation and embodiment, thereby restaking Hong Kong’s claim to the global contemporary.