Conference paper, Saturday, October 20th, 2007, 09:15 a.m.
Oscar Ho Hing-kay – Business, Politic and People: Museum Development in Asia
Power of taste
Like many Asian places with a colonial history, art has always been the enjoyment of a minority of the elitists (the literati tradition in Chinese culture is only the other side of the coin). At places such as the fashionable Shanghai, where another form of colonization, a colonization of consumerism, is going on, to be associated with art, especially Western contemporary art, is always a sign of upgrading oneself to be among the chic.I remember soon after I started my job at MOCA Shanghai, I mentioned to my staff of my interest in arranging kids from poorer, rural areas to visit our museum, as an attempt to make art more accessible to people. Immediately responses from local staff were strong and negative, for they fear that visits of the poor would downgrade the image of the museum. They believed that such move would definitely cause devastating damages. Suddenly I realized that we were speaking very different languages.
In Hong Kong, one of the toughest battles we had to fight against was the pressure from a small but powerful group of collectors and dealers who insisted on building Ink Museum within M+. The idea of outstanding a particular medium and set aside a museum for it would definitely ruin the totality of the concept of M+. Despite the tremendous pressure some members were put under, ultimately the idea was not accepted.
While we recognize Ink Painting, especially Modern Ink Painting plays an important role in Hong Kong and Chinese art in the 20th Century, some of us feel that it should not continue to enjoy a special treatment that it has been enjoying for decades within the government museum system.
The swift to visual culture and popular culture in particular, although not welcome by everyone, is recognition of the value of everyday cultural experience of the people. By opening up the definition and restructuring the hierarchy of art, M+ could provide a more embracing, more engaging cultural experience the general public can identify with.
Lack of infrastructural support
While the idea of recognizing the importance of local cultural heritage from a broader perspective is a welcomed one, the problem one has to face immediately is the lack of research and collection for undertaking the necessary curatorial work. We have experts in Western or Chinese art, but hardly any in the studies of Hong Kong art or popular culture.The recent development in recognizing the importance of local culture has revealed a long, accumulated defect of Hong Kong: our culture have never been seriously preserved and studied. As pointed out by the Filipino critic Gina Fairley, one of the problems many Asian cities facing is the lack of reference material for their artists and curators to contextualize their work and to understand the historical references they use.
Who is going to run it?
When the new proposal came out, responses have been, generally speaking, positive. While there is a lot of worry about the West Kowloon Project turning out to be another ‘White Elephant’ projects, the arts community is eager to see a new project to counter-balance the a highly twisted cultural ecology.One of the most frequently asked questions from the public is: where is the software? Similar to many cities in Asia, Hong Kong suffers from a highly imbalanced cultural infrastructure that suffocates the nurturing of museum professionals. Most public museums are run by the government and are by its bureaucratic nature, inactive and conservative. Contemporary art are left in the hands of small alternative spaces, which could not provide adequate nurturing of museum professionals because of their extremely small scale operation. Suddenly there is a museum as big as Tate Modern going to be opened in 9 years, where can we pump out all these museum professionals in a short time?
In Shanghai, we had this joke that the life span of a museum there is normally around two years, for the problems of their lack of professional maintenance normally surfaces after two years (obviously this is only a joke, and there are museums which could run properly, but for those of you who visit the museums in China, it is not difficult to realize that there is a lot of truth in this joke).
The other most frequently asked question is: where is the audience? The public are simply not interested in the arts. There have been suggestions on strengthening art education to help nurturing the audience. That is definitely one direction we should go.
But I still believe that people don’t come to museum because they find museum uninteresting. How can we make visiting museum an integrated part of our community’s life? How can we, within the context of Asia, rearticulate the content, the language of interpretation and format of display, so that whatever we do will be meaningful to our communities?
Launching the West Kowloon project is like opening the Pandora box, suddenly all the questions on cultural development are raised. Another concern raised by the community is the imbalance of cultural development, fearing that the majority of the resources and attention would get sucked to this new fancy art place, making the situation worst for small, grassroots cultural groups located outside of the grand centre of the arts. With the increased interest in community arts in recent years, pressures have been building upon the government to look at cultural development in its ecological totality, instead of just spotlighting on just one single mega platform.
Arts for the people
Like the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, the implementation of the West Kowloon Cultural District project is the result of a long battle between the community and the government. The government finally decided to get cultured, should we go for it? Is it too big for us? Should we start off with the grass-roots, from bottom up in stead of top down? But, like many of our Asian neighbours, we have been working at the bottoms for decades, and still stay on at the bottom!This sudden zeal for culture of the government is probably based on the wrong reasons, but it nevertheless provides a golden opportunity to create a new possibility for cultural development, if we do it right. Building a grand high-rise on a foundation that is not convincingly solid could be dangerous. There are still a lot of uncertainty and risk involved in implementing this art space called M+.
But then, art is about vision and dream, and is also about uncertainty and risk-taking. If we are afraid of that, we should not be in this profession anyway.
