Trying to find a chunking mansion express character ending up in Felix bar on the rooftop of Peninsula. Taking night shots

Hong Kong is probably the worst place for inter- or multicultural romanticism. Whoever believes that cultures, for instance Western and Far Eastern ones, are necessarily distinct entities will be disappointed here. HK rather suggests that singularity and similarity might as well be the two sides of the same coin. Exoticizing and othering tendencies have a hard time in HK, notwithstanding the persistence of difference. Especially HK island is a genuine transcultural place. The „inter“ in interculturality presupposes that there are still at least two distinct cultures and a void between them. The prefix „trans“ refers to „beyond“ and „through“, hence „transcultural“ suggests that we can go beyond given understandings of culture, that we can move through cultures.

Colonial history, globalization, financial capitalism, and tourism have turned HK, using Homi Bhabha’s term, into a „third space“ beyond oppositional pairs such as „familiar and exotic“, „known and unknown“, „new and old“. What Kim Gordon writes bout HK in her autobiography Girld in a Band certainly still holds true: „Hong Kong was like nothing I had ever experienced before. […] I felt so overwhelmed by Hong Kong’s heat, chaos, clamor, and odors that I was convinced I would never—never—survive there a year.“ However, this experience is mitigated in manifold ways. At the airport, you get your Octopus Card which allows for fast and smooth payment anywhere in the city. You don’t get any stares in the streets as a white guy, you’re not being harassed. You float through the city easily via MTR. You always find someone who speaks English, globalization’s lingua franca. You discover some strange, but much more often strangely unstrange things: Ovaltine is one of them. (image 1) Or take this muscle car in Lockhart Road – a Ferrari just like any other Ferrari. With the slight difference that it seems to be a vegetarian or a Muslim one. (image 2). And how about this fountain on Statue Square? (image 3) It’s definitely a fountain, but the usual flow of water is inversed

If transculturality means – and I subscribe to this – that „the differences no longer come about through a juxtaposition of clearly delineated cultures …, but result between transcultural networks, which have some things in common while differing in others, showing overlaps and distinctions at the same time“ (Wolfgang Welsch), then HK is indeed the genius loci for our program „Transcultural Collaboration“. HK is not about a (friendly) „clash of civilizations“ (Samuel P. Huntington). Instead, it has developed into a hybrid in the sense of Nikos Papastergiadis – „not confined to a cataloguing of difference. […] Hybridity is both the assemblage that occurs whenever two ore more elements meet, and the initiation of a process of change.“ Papastergiadi’s definition of hybridity as an „energy field of different forces“ is at the same time a suitable definition of HK.

That said, in my lectures in the Connecting Space during my two-week stay, I stressed that we need to transcend the narrative „Asia meets Europe“ and that we should leave behind the focus on ethnicity which has sneaked into the contemporary biennalized art system „through an unspoken policy of integrated casting“ (Kobena Mercer). Instead of focusing on cataloguing and trying to overcome alleged or factual cultural differences, we might also explore transcultural aspects in that which appears to be monocultural.

For instance Christianity. The Catholic church is inherently transcultural since, in the course of its development, it has incorporated a broad range of heterogeneous elements. If you compare Jesus Christ, a jobless, long-haired Hippie savior, with former Pope Benedict, a spooky head of state wearing Prada shoes, you get what I mean. (image 4)

Or think of Motörhead. (image 5) At first glance, this is the monocultural band per se. In fact, however, it is a fascinating hybrid of the interconnected but highly different (sub)cultures of blues, rock’n’roll, punk rock and heavy metal. Learning from HK means becoming aware that even while listening to „Ace of Spades“, one embarks on a journey across an archipelago of singularity and similarity, interconnectedness and difference. Thus, transculturality precedes and transcends the revival of ethnicity in globalization.

Jörg Scheller, art historian and head of BA Photography, Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland was lecture guest at the Lecture Series on Transculturality.

Read more about his lecture Cosmopolitan Rhapsody – Transcultural Tendencies in the Music Video Genre here

Lecturer by Ouyang-Yu

Author, Melbourne/Shanghai

‚Migration for Good, for an Eternal Étranger‘, a topic Ouyang Yu will be talking about in which he’ll describe his experience as an Australian citizen living and teaching in China where he was born, how his writings are censored in both China and Australia, for the similar reasons of unmarketability, and how he lives as a poet and novelist writing in two languages in two countries, with English unpublishable in China and Chinese unpublishable in Australia, or only to a very limited degree.
Ouyang Yu, born in Huangzhou, Hubei, in the People’s Republic of China, completed an MA in English and Australian Literature in Shanghai and worked as an interpreter, translator and lecturer in China. He came to Australia in 1991 to complete a PhD at La Trobe University, Melbourne, on the representation of the Chinese in Australian fiction (awarded 1995). He writes in both English and Chinese. Best known for his poetry, he has also written fiction and criticism in both languages, and has translated over a dozen major Australian literary texts into Chinese.

Ouyang’s best-known works in English are his poetry collections Moon Over Melbourne and Other Poems (1995, 2nd revised edn 2005), Songs of the Last Chinese Poet (1997, short-listed for the 1999 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards) and Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-Coloured Eyes (2002). His first novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, was published in 2002. He is the founding editor of Otherland, the first (and only) bilingual journal of Chinese-Australian writing. He has won a number of major grants for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and translation.

Thursday, November 12 – 7pm
Connecting Space Hong Kong

Workshop by Brandon Farnsworth, Music Curator

Through a mix of presentations and performances, the Connecting Sound Workshop offered a space for artists working in various performing arts fields to come together in a relaxed atmosphere and share practices, ideas, and experiences. It offered a space that promoted unexpected encounters while placing no emphasis on finished products, preferring rather to spill into the eternal flow of practice.

Several moments during the workshop stood out because of their surprising but somehow also inevitable nature. These intuitive moments were in retrospect inexorable, though could never have been premeditated. It was precisely this nature that lent them their significance, and which hopefully could inflect positive change in the practices of the participants.

Lecture by Zhao Chuan

Writer, art critic, curator and theatre director

„The stage is a small world, and the world is a big stage“- how does reality unveil drama every day and make it impossible for us to stay out of social theatre?  Grass Stage is a theatre collective founded in spring 2005. Under the direction of Zhao Chuan—writer, curator and theater director, it has put on a number of programs and performances which steadily grew in influence and acclaim.  The members of Grass Stage encourage ordinary persons to enter the theater to create a social theater with a rich social conscience.  Grass Stage’s pieces, within a framework of the most basic “poor theater”, use a diverse set of techniques including physical theater, texts, documentary footage, oral story-telling, clown performance and performance art, engendering powerful spaces for intellectual exchange.  Over the years it has deployed various venues to stage not-for-profit performances and discussions in China. Their theatre has thus become a gathering spots for all kinds of people, continually creating fluid public spaces. Their post-performance talks have often become the scene of theatre unexpectedly.

Zhao Chuan is a writer, art critic, curator and theatre director who creates alternative, political theatre in Shanghai. He is the founding member and mastermind of the very important Chinese theatre collective Grass Stage since 2005. His work devoted to the promotion of new social theatre movement and the creation of non-profit public space. The collective has focused on deepening the connection between theatre and society, and has made use of a wide range of venues and situations for performances and discussions. Grass Stage events are not only spaces for bringing together diverse elements of society, but also provide, in a country relatively lacking in opportunities for public participation, a fluid and varied range of public social spaces. His theatre works have been performed in many Chinese cities, as well as in outside of China. Zhao Chuan has been awarded several literature awards, including the Unita Prize for New Novelists (Taiwan 2001). His curatorial projects including 2014 Performance Project at OCAT Shenzhen; “Action Asia” at Shanghai Rockbund Art Museum from 2013 to 2014. He was artistic director for Mecooon Fringe Festival in Shanghai in 2009 and 2010.

Thursday, October 29 – 7pm
Connecting Space Hong Kong

Lecture by Christopher Kriese

What would you do if you knew nobody was watching? What

would you do if you were invisible in the real world? What

would you do if you were invisible in the internet? How could

anonymity transform arts and activism?

This is an experimental short lecutre. please send feedback to: kriese@posteo.de

Lecture by Lin Hongjohn

Curator and Chairperson of Fine Arts Dep, Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan

In 1703 the high society of London there appeared George Psalmanaazaar who claimed himself a Formosan to be abducted by a Christian missionary. In his book, An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa(1704) , described Formosa to be a country of abundant resources, governed by a Japanese ruler.  In this fictive book, Formosan people was almost half-naked, only wearing silver plates over their private parts. Horses, camels, and elephants were domesticated for transportation. One of the high peaks of the book was that every year Formosans sacrificed the eldest sons to their gods, and even in the second edition (1705), Formosan were exaggerated as cannibals, who ate those were sacrificed and executed. Being a celebrity of his exotic oriental identity and feted by all the literary and philosophical lions of London, Psalmanaazaar were even invited to teach Formosan in Oxford University. Psalmanaazaar was the beau monde in the celebrities of London.

Psalmanaazaar’s real identity is still unknown today, as much as in his will he still signed with the fictional Taiwanese name. In order to portray as a Formosan, he ate raw meat with various heavy spices. He even lighted candle when he slept to pass for the other that he was actually reading, for Formosans, according to his book, learned knowledge through their sleeps. For 18th century occidental world Ilha Formosa, Taiwan, represents one of the most distant country they can imagine not just geographically but symbolically as well.

Since 2008, I have been working on this fake Taiwanese under the title The Museum of George Psalmanazzare, MOGP exhibiting in Rotterdam, Manchester, Shanghai and Taipei. In the 2012 Taipei Biennial as participated artist, the project was presented in a manner much similar to that of museum. I link the secrete path between identity and the politics of fantasy, and the other, the real of the local, much as a missing part that is intrinsic to the real Taiwanese. In combining the seemingly impossible fragments of sights and sounds, to link the web of identity politics that linger between the ancient and the contemporary, the truth and falsity to capture the fleeting moment of the perverse, the primitive, the empowered to glance the phantom of history.  

Thursday, October 01 – 7pm
Connecting Space Hong Kong

Lecturer by Gina Marchetti

Professor at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, calling for a more open procedure for vetting candidates for its first exercise in universal suffrage in the election of its Chief Executive in 2017, does not have an explicit “feminist” agenda.  However, initial research shows that over fifty percent of participants in the movement are female. Although underrepresented in visible leadership roles and in media reports on the demonstrations, women have played an essential part in all aspects of the movement. Moreover, they suffered from sexual harassment by counter-demonstrators intent on intimidating them and infringing on their right to public assembly.  As Mirana Sze-to’s preliminary analysis shows, women activists shaped the physical space and quotidian operation of occupying Central, Causeway Bay, and Mongkok in very visible ways—from redecorating public bathrooms and crafting agit-prop artworks to running supplies and operating “democracy” study halls. They drew on various transnational cultural icons and ideas to support their political aims with nods to female artists such as Yoko Ono as well as noticeable ties to global LGBTQ rainbow movements.

During the demonstrations, women media artists took up cameras to record events and document their active participation in the political process.  This presentation examines how these filmmakers see themselves as women with cameras observing as well as confronting Hong Kong’s political deadlock in relation to broader questions of the role of women in democratic movements globally. The talk highlights the diversity of the female media artists, coming from North America, Europe, Vietnam, mainland China, and elsewhere, who helped to put the Umbrella Movement on screen for world audiences.   Their motion pictures illustrate the transcultural, cosmopolitanism at the root of transnational feminist theory today, and how this plays a critical role in depiction of Hong Kong activism for international audiences.

Gina Marchetti teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong. Her books include Romance and the „Yellow Peril“: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (1993), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s INFERNAL AFFAIRS The Trilogy (2007), From Tian’anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (2006), and The Chinese Diaspora on American Screens: Race, Sex, and Cinema (2012). Information on her project on Hong Kong women filmmakers can be found at https://hkwomenfilmmakers.wordpress.com/.

Tuesday, September 15 –  5:30pm
University of Hong Kong, Rm 404, Run Run Shaw Tower