Hong Kong visual arts hacker space Spring Workshop set to close despite Wong Chuk Hang’s rebirth
Music will be the focus at the non-profit art organisation in its final year, says Hong Kong’s ‘Queen of Arts’ Mimi Brown, who has vowed the space will live on in one form or another
There used to be just one reason for visiting a grotty factory building called the Remex Centre in Hong Kong’s Wong Chuk Hang district: picking up your orders at a no-frills meat and fish wholesaler with a constant background noise of meat slicers and the unmistakable smell of frozen carcasses. And then in 2012, Spring Workshop moved into the third floor, and the Remex Centre became a favourite haven for the arts community.
For the past five years, Mimi Brown’s non-profit art organisation has provided the visual arts equivalent to a hacker space. About 200 local and international artists, curators, musicians and occasionally farmers and writers, have been to the 14,500 sq ft space to meet, collaborate, or simply hang out. There are studios, exhibition spaces, a vast outdoor terrace and excellent coffee. Schoolteachers take their classes to visit, and young people who have never been to an art space before make this a weekend destination.
Recent projects that attest to Spring Workshop’s eclectic nature – and won it the 2016 Prudential Eye Award for best Asian contemporary art organisation – include “Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor”, a three-month series of exhibitions,“chocolate readings” and hypnosis sessions; HK Farm’s one-year residency that saw the urban farming activists leading workshops and creating a farmer’s almanac with artists and writers; and Wu Tsang’s “Duilian”, a multimedia, queer reimagination of the life of Chinese revolutionary heroine Qiu Jin that was completed during two three-month residencies at Spring Workshop.
