Arrivals and Departures is an exhibition about Hong Kong. Taking the 10th anniversary year of the handover/re-unification as an opportune moment to revisit Hong Kong, it brings together current artistic responses to the place. Continuing Urbis’ exploration of cities and urban life, the exhibition presents a dual perspective of Hong Kong both from within and outside the city through 10 newly commissioned works by Hong Kong and British Chinese artists.

Within a UK context of migration and immigration the exhibition provides an opportunity to investigate the relationship to a distanced place. The biggest wave of Chinese immigration from Hong Kong took place in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the post-war labour shortage. Today there are an estimated quarter of a million Chinese people living in the UK (the number is in reality is likely to be much higher given the increase in illegal economic migrants including the highly publicised migrants from Fujian province of China).

The Race Relations Act of 1976 and subsequent legislation has impacted on arts funding with a recent emphasis on supporting cultural diversity and greater representation. Poised between Britain’s colonial past and its current rhetoric of multiculturalism, how have first generation British Chinese artists sought to discuss their relationship to Hong Kong? In response to the shift away from identity based art to outward looking enquiries, the exhibition seeks to present new ways of exploring and articulating a relationship to a place, which are more subtle and nuanced.

The context in which Hong Kong artists are working is one that has been shaped from the 1980s and 1990s in the lead up to and following the ‘97 handover/re-unification. It was exacerbated by the 2003 large-scale demonstration in protest to the legislation of Article 23 of the Basic Law (national security act)*, which was seen to infringe on civic freedom.

The carnival like participation has brought the once intellectual (re)assessment of Hong Kong’s political/cultural identity to a grass-roots and mainstream audience. The current cultural ambitions of Hong Kong and its plans for West Kowloon Cultural District* have also brought to light a surprising desire to imbed a sense of the local and inject culturally specific elements into what was designed to be an international arts space. Noticeably, many artists have turned their attention away from overt political symbolism to the politics of the everyday, with microscopic observations and articulations 

Drawing together these two contexts, Arrivals and Departures suggests that a notion of place exists at many levels from the lived experience of minutiae of everyday life to a desire to connect to a distant place. Taking a broad range of inspiration as their starting points, such as family histories, urban myths and narratives, tourist imagery, cityscapes, material culture knitted into lived experience, the commissioned works together create multiple perspectives of Hong Kong which reflect shifting identities and conditions.

In Arrivals and Departures, Hong Kong is both close and far away, real and imagined, individual and collective.

Gordon Cheung

Arrivals and Departures is the first major exhibition on Hong Kong to take place in the UK. It is an Urbis exhibition curated by Sally Lai and Yuen Fong Ling in collaboration with Hong Kong curatorial partners Howard Chan and Siu King-chung.