130 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103
It was, ironically, raining heavily when I arrived at
the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the
group show “Before the Rain.” Leaving my umbrella
at the Sydney gallery’s entrance, I stepped in from
the busy, drizzly street to be greeted by a small
marquee that was Sampson Wong’s re-creation of
one of the temporary structures that characterized
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations of
- Wong, along with the Umbrella Movement
Visual Archive and Research Collective, 4A director
Mikala Tai and other artists including James Kong
and Swing Lam, had transformed the ground floor
and stairwell of 4A into a space exploring this key
moment in Hong Kong’s history.
On the walls, a series of annotated diagrams
created by Lam mapped the tent cities that made
up the Fragrant Harbor’s answer to the global
Occupy movement. They revealed the ephemeral
constructions, from study rooms to first-aid tents,
that served the needs of the movement’s tens of
thousands of participants and sustained their
participation over 79 days. Lam’s careful recording
imprinted a sense of permanence and legitimacy
onto these improvised, unsanctioned structures.
Inside the marquee, a monitor played The
Umbrella Movement (2014), an MSNBC Originals
documentary bringing together voices representative
of the key elements of this movement, whose
participants were wholly invested in the street
occupation. In the same space was Kong’s two-
channel time-lapse video, 1 of 79 Days (2014), of the
flow of bodies through some of the occupied areas
made by secreting cameras inside cake tins. The
documentary and Kong’s work gave different senses
of the movement’s dynamism—complex individual
concerns were found amid mass collective action.
Up to this point, the exhibition breathed a sense
of the occupation’s immediacy, and in the first floor
gallery this mingled with a contemplative mood. A
small but eye-catching work greeted viewers at the
top of the stairs—Tang Kwok Hin’s Offhand-over
(2016) is the presentation of a red enamel badge,
which was actually the artist’s award from the Hong
Kong government in 2014, issued to “Persons with
Outstanding Contribution to the Development of
Arts and Culture.” In light of the protest movement,
Tang found it difficult to acknowledge the award
from an authority whose views no longer aligned
with his own, opting to receive it by post rather
than return from abroad to accept it in person. The
artist’s small but potent gesture sits at the nexus of
art and politics, and was a fitting introduction to
the mix of personal expressions and social actions
of the other artists. Sarah Lai and Luke Ching
both employed awkward gestures to highlight the
absurdity of Hong Kong’s bureaucratic structures.
Lai roped off arbitrary areas of the gallery with
security barriers, while Ching’s work included 150
fingernail-sized laminated copies of the artist’s
actual Hong Kong Identity Card, during the
production of which he insisted on being
photographed with mouth half-agape, breaking
one of the rules of portraiture in state-issued
identification documents.
The exhibition took a historical view with
the inclusion of Ellen Pau’s early work Diversion
(1990), which uses analog video editing techniques
to combine government newsreel footage of a
swimming contest in Hong Kong in the 1960s with
the ominous metaphor of a burning object falling
through a stairwell. Pau captures the sentiments
that ricocheted through China, Hong Kong and
beyond in the post-Tiananmen period, following
the crackdown by the Chinese government on
student activists in Beijing in 1989. Hongkongers
were beset by increasing uncertainty about the
pending transfer of their territory’s sovereignty
from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of
China in 1997. These sentiments ring true for Hong
Kong-Australians, many of whom left the port city
to seek new beginnings in a Western democratic
system. However, as the younger artists in “Before
the Rain” showed, this anxiety, and the need to
address it, continues even in a new generation.
As I retrieved my umbrella and stepped onto
the gray streets of Sydney’s Chinatown, I reflected
on the vulnerability of democracy, and the
importance of collective agency in its defense.
Waves of global protests have taken place recently,
with escalating intensity in the past few months.
Two and a half years on, the peaceful organization,
determination, resourcefulness and endurance
of the Umbrella occupiers continue to resonate,
even seas away.
CHLOÉ WOLIFSONSYDNEY
4A Centre for Contemporary Asian ArtBEFORE THE RAIN