Belgian artist Francis Alÿs confronts us-and-them mentality in Hong Kong exhibition that focuses on migration
- Mexico-based artist’s enduring interest in sites of conflict brings him to Hong Kong – after Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon – ‘to understand what is happening’
- Disturbing video of children re-enacting artist’s failed project to line up boats to form a bridge from Africa to Europe is the centrepiece of show at Tai Kwun
It wasn’t just the rarity of an overseas artist’s visit amid the coronavirus pandemic that made Francis Alÿs’ arrival so hotly anticipated in Hong Kong. His three decades of making humanist, absurdist art from his home in Mexico City and in other places outside the mainstream, developed art centres have informed the work of two generations of Hong Kong conceptual artists.
These include Tozer Pak Sheung-chuen, now in his forties, who participated in a 2010 international exhibition called “I‘m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs”, and millennials such as Ice Wong Kei-suet – last month, the 25-year-old made There’s no beginning. There’s no end. almost entirely from candyfloss, recalling Alÿs’ ephemeral Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing (1997), in which he pushed a block of ice through the streets until it melted.
To the Belgian-born, 33-year Mexico resident, his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong was definitely worth quarantining for (especially since his 14 days of isolation were spent in a flat on Lamma Island with a glorious view). He tends to create art on the spot when he tours, so in the 90 hours he had left in Hong Kong after his quarantine, he went to various neighbourhoods to film children at play.
Alÿs, 61, has been to Hong Kong before, but the filming reflects an enduring interest in sites of conflict that has taken him to Afghanistan, to a refugee camp in Iraq, and to Beirut.
They are so much more patient than children I have seen in other places. Here, their capacity of adaptation is also more visible
The edited footage will be added to his continuing series, called “Children’s Games” – one of the projects included in his exhibition, “Wet Feet __ Dry Feet: Borders and Games”, at Tai Kwun in Central district.
“The Hong Kong protests have been eclipsed by news about the pandemic now. But before the pandemic, Hong Kong became front page news,” the artists says in a moment of calm before the exhibition opened on Tuesday. “Normally, you don’t hear of Hong Kong unless you are in business and trading, but during the protests it was very prominent in the minds of a lot of people. I am interested in witnessing it myself, to better understand what is happening here.”
The dramatic events in Hong Kong, which began in the spring of 2019 when a government proposal to broaden extradition arrangements with other jurisdictions, including mainland China, sparked street protests, capture the growing sense of precariousness the world over.
While Hong Kong is nowhere near as violent as Mexico City, Alÿs senses similar tensions simmering.
“In Hong Kong, you have to be alert when you walk on the streets. There are a lot of physical obstacles. There is always something distracting you. Like Mexico City, there is also a similar tension playing out here between a postmodern, global world, and a more traditional society, and both places are trying to find [their] own identity,” he says.
What life was like for Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong camps
More broadly, as an immigrant who is forever the gringo in Mexico, his Hong Kong exhibition addresses the us-and-them mentality that is splitting the world apart.
A line formed by toy sailing boats divides the first room in the exhibition into two halves. These were the “shoe boats” made out of rubber flip-flops and babouches that groups of children in Gibraltar and Morocco carried with them as they walked out into the sea for the video installation Don’t Cross the Bridge Before Getting to the River (2008). They were acting out a failed attempt to get fishermen and private-boat owners to form a line with their vessels to create a temporary bridge crossing the Strait of Gibraltar between Africa and Europe.
In 2006, Alÿs made another failed attempt to form a bridge with boats across another geopolitically sensitive body of water, between Havana, Cuba, and Key West, Florida. As Tan Xue, curator of the exhibition, points out, its title refers to a previous US policy on Cuban refugees under which those intercepted at sea (“wet feet”) were repatriated but those discovered on land (“dry feet”) were allowed to stay.
It has an uncanny parallel with Hong Kong’s own “touch base” policy on illegal immigrants from China in the 1970s, she says.
His art is always about finding a way in a seemingly impossible situation. It is inspiring and encouraging for all of us trying to make sense of the world and pandemic
The 2008 video is on view in the room next to where the toy boats are, and it is extremely disturbing given what we know of recent tragedies at sea involving families desperately trying to reach Europe. The camera follows the children gleefully walking into a choppy sea with their toy boats and then it goes under water, heightening the sense of peril and the vulnerability of the children’s misplaced innocence.
The same tension exists in the “Children’s Games” films that feature, for example, young boys playing with hoops and sticks in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, infamous as the site of the Taleban’s destruction of two 6th century standing Buddhas carved from cliff faces.
However, Alÿs sees children and the games that they play as symbolising the power of creativity rather than the weakness of the innocent. They create their own space, their own rules, their own names for things, he says. It is this world, where grown-up rules do not apply, that is his preferred way of glimpsing the essence of a different culture. What he observed in the children in Hong Kong is resilience.
“They are so much more patient than children I have seen in other places. Here, their capacity of adaptation is also more visible [because of the lack of space],” he says. (He would not reveal what it is that he filmed before the clips are added to the exhibition in November.) At the end of the day, his work on children’s games is about resistance and hope, he adds.
Tan says: “His coming to Hong Kong now is very relevant to Hong Kong and Hong Kong artists. His art is always about finding a way in a seemingly impossible situation. It is inspiring and encouraging for all of us trying to make sense of the world and pandemic and all the sociopolitical problems.”
“Wet Feet __ Dry Feet: Borders and Games”, JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun, 10 Hollywood Road, Central, 11am-7pm, Tue-Sun. Until February 6, 2021.
