footnoting The Inner, Outer Sphere 
 
Yeung Yang, art and cultural critic, Hong Kong
September, 2006 
 
 
The general act of crossing necessitates questions of departures and arrivals. The specific act of eight Hong Kong artists crossing time-zones necessitates questions of Hong Kong, Hong Kong art, and art itself.  
Big History 

First, the question of Hong Kong. A similar ‘question’ had been circulated in Hong Kong public space a decade ago1. The ‘Hong Kong question’ was the abbreviation for issues around Hong Kong’s sovereignty changeover from the 1980’s to 1997. Interestingly, the Chinese translation for ‘question’ is a composite term that could also mean a ‘problem’. As if the ambivalence among Hong Kong people was unreal and unjustified, Beijing saw the ‘problem’ solved once Hong Kong was “liberated” from colonial rule.  

Almost ten years after the sovereignty changeover, the ‘Hong Kong question’ is glossed over by the cosmopolitan dream, or the need to perpetuate that dream created on the basis of an infinite lack. The imagineered2 desire to be on the top manifests itself as not just a behaviour, but a defining trait of being a Hong Kong-er.  

This desire regulates our urban landscape. Look up and one sees skyscrapers soaring up so high they beat the mountains. Look down and try to take one footstep and you tread on another person’s heels. Hong Kong is this crowded. 

As we furnish our Victoria Harbour with virtual heritage3 and colour light beams shooting up the sky every night4 to freeze space and time in a spectacle of ‘stability and prosperity’5, art becomes urgent, which leads to the second question.  
 
 
Small Moves 
In a public forum on contemporary art and the art market that took place earlier this year in the Goethe Institute of Hong Kong, director of Grotto Fine Art6 Henry Au-yeung said Hong Kong art is different from Chinese art in that there is no outright political statement. Instead, there tends to be an introspection and narrativization of personal states of being. It would be crude, even inaccurate, to understand this introspection as some psychological prodding of primal instincts lost in civilization, or some disinterested contemplation from am imagined distance.  

Jeff Leung, curator of a recent exhibition of Hong Kong contemporary visual artists, describes artists born in the 1970s and after as having inherited art “western in form”, but “motivated by concerns different far to [sic] the cultural and historical context of [sic] West.”7He said rather than ‘inheriting’ Chinese culture, or looking towards Western art ‘with reverence’, the artists ‘use both cultures with ease.’8 There is no border to cross; no cage to liberate oneself from. There is only the shaking up of the inner and outer spheres that have to be perpetuated “states of emergency”9.  

Air Pockets 
In <The Inner, Outer Sphere>, you encounter a pocket, one among many, full of air. It is hewn out from the skyward trend and the safe anonymity of the urban pack-jam, like bamboo poles and red-white-blue tarp stretching out from concrete slabs, like wild vines crawling and grasping onto the base of flyovers. It is a small pocket, amenable, insistent. 
As Jeanette Winterson says, “Against the daily death [art] does not die.”10 To find some measure of language (in particular a foreign language to those who speak Cantonese in our daily lives) for the state of being contemporary for the artists making the crossing is to be too much, too soon.