DATE: Saturday, June 28, 1997               TAG: 9706280009

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: BY ROBERT HOBBS 

                                            LENGTH:   82 lines

ART OFFERS VANTAGE POINT ON HONG KONG IDENTITY

While political pundits are making book on the common future of Hong Kong and China after the July 1 transfer of this 153-year-old British crown colony to China, a small group of Hong Kong artists is involved in quiet but intense acts of self-definition. Their deadline is midnight, June 30. And their objective is to define the ``way of life'' that China promises to maintain until 2047.

Hong Kong's identity as a way station for refugees leaving China after the communist takeover in 1949 has been subsumed under transactional imperatives: first as a manufacturing center, then a marketplace and duty-free port and today a world-class financial center. Considered less its own community than a base of operations, this territory has been both British and Chinese, international and regional. Questions about the territory's future have become increasingly disturbing at the same time that the spectacular growth of its economic capability promises continued prosperity.

Working paradoxically within the freedoms and constraints created by possible totalitarian rule and the seemingly unlimited free-market economies already in place, Hong Kong artists have been developing a spectrum of identities that share features of hybridity, contingency and irony.

In anticipation of this historic transfer, Virginia Commonwealth University has been assembling a cross-section of Hong Kong art that serves as a series of ongoing proposals about this dynamic identity, rather than definitive interpretations of a ``way of life.'' Currently, Hong Kongers are beset by too many varied and even contradictory forces to achieve a common identity for even a moment.

The art now being made in Hong Kong is part of a necessary process of discursive work that links separate realities and helps to stabilize or destabilize forces, depending on whether a piece is presented as a picture of ongoing reality or a hint of future rifts. Rather than succumbing to propaganda and telling people what to think, the works exhibited at VCU by nine contemporary Hong Kong artists pose questions, establish intriguing conjunctions and encourage viewers to consider diverse responses. Instead of playing partisan politics, this art fashions new alliances between disparate realms. These works play with symbols and artistic traditions, at times sustaining and deflecting traditional meanings by demanding that viewers look anew at the possibilities of being a Hong Konger.

Neither entirely Eastern nor Western in its outlook, this art oscillates between these two traditional polarities and shows how post-colonial artistic production is an ongoing negotiation of differences, a tentative resolution of contradictions and an ironic doubling of mainstream strategies that mimic and undermine the afflatus of established modes. For example, Oscar Ho's drawings establish a conversation between contemporary urban folklore and the Ching Dynasty illustrated newspapers of the previous century. Gretchen So focuses on the dynamics of change that merge old and new worlds and join documentary and fine art genres. And Lucia Cheung creates continuities between traditional conceptions of Chinese landscapes and modern architecture, subtly underscoring the gulf between past and present.

Because change might be interpreted as a cultural critique of Mainland China, these artists are taking great personal risk by tackling these fundamental questions. The time of the takeover is still set; yet the terms are changed so that the mission of formulating a Hong Kong lifestyle becomes a potential mine field.

Through the exploration of artists' choices, viewers can envision a host of scenarios for Hong Kong's future: the continuation of the region's limited autonomy; repatriation tantamount to a radical reconfiguration of the territory and a submerging of its distinctness; possible stalemate with China in which both become rigid about their respective turfs; and a mutually reinforcing redefinition of values and goals based on the common good and a dynamic outlook.

Other possibilities exist, and maybe the clock will not stop on July 1. Perhaps Hong Kongers will be permitted to develop viable and dynamic options for themselves. But the sheer size of China and the traditional difficulties of administering such an enormous territory with its two systems, many provinces and competing regional affiliations militate against such freedom and flexibility. In such a vast and populous country, politics have often become a matter of expediency; bureaucracy a tool of homogenization and too often a means of graft; and identity a shorthand cipher replacing the enmeshed web of disparate realities, uncertainties and sheer bravura occasioned by dynamic growth. For now, these artists open a window on potential. MEMO: Robert C. Hobbs is the Rhoda Thalhimer Chair in American Art at

Virginia Commonwealth University. He is co-curator of ``Hong Kong Now!''

which runs June 27-Oct. 5 at VCU's Anderson Gallery.

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