Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
When I lived in Hong Kong around 1980, I was amused by the anti-colonialist Guardian newspaper in Britain being forced to admire the bureaucratic handling of the chaotic Vietnamese refugee influx—white-outfitted civil servants taking down meticulous details as queues of bedraggled boat people waited their turn to be taken into open-door refugee camps that would lead to resettlement in the kinder world of those days.
Clearly, post-colonial Hong Kong has learnt something from those days. Even as the new Chinese bosses were being challenged by the Yellow Umbrella movement that shut down not just streets but the very acme of Hong Kong’s existence—business—for 79 days in 2014, an Umbrella Movement Visual Archive was being assiduously collected by the more bureaucratic-minded demonstrators.
Before the Rain is a recovery action by the Hong Kong-born Mikala Tai, curator of the exhibition and Director of 4A. One of the artists involved is the intriguing Sampson Wong, whose work Capturing a Hyperevent: Artistic Records of the Umbrella Movement, prepared with Mikala Tai, is a visual archive of ephemeral material collected during the Movement. Wong is an urban studies major in the creative practices of Occupy cultures, who was involved for two years in preparing an Occupy action for Hong Kong involving parks and open spaces, only to be overtaken by the spontaneous explosion that went straight on to the streets. Unfazed, today he compares the events of 2014 to the 19th Century Paris Commune—which ended a little more bloodily with some 20,000 deaths and 38,000 arrests.
That level of drama is not apparent in Sydney’s Chinatown. It is all too neat and tidy, diminished by both the small size of the artworks—especially the tablet