Art project aims to change the conversation about tourist-trap village Sok Kwu Wan on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island
- Sok Kwu Wan is more than a strip of restaurants serving pricey imported seafood to tourists – that’s the message of Lamma Mia, a public art project
- 15 artists from elsewhere in Hong Kong have been invited to engage with villagers – whether native or incomers – and create art that speaks to the community
To most people in Hong Kong, Sok Kwu Wan at the southern end of Lamma Island is a place for tourists. They associate its inhabitants with a row of seafood restaurants serving rather pricey imports and with putting on excursions for day trippers to the Lamma Fisherfolk’s Village, a museum dedicated to keeping up an idyllic myth.
It is misconceptions like these that “Lamma Mia”, a three-month public art project, wants to challenge. By inviting artists who are not from Lamma to conduct lengthy interviews with islanders, organisers hope to draw out nuances and paradoxes of island living that can lead to broader questions about local identity, an idea highly pertinent in today’s world.
The community project for Sok Kwu Wan was initiated by Anthony Leung Bo-shan, an artist and cultural critic who has lived in that part of Lamma Island for more than 20 years.
Like many residents, she is an immigrant who is not from an indigenous Lamma family descended through the male line or from boat-dwellers who settled generations ago on the island. But this is “home” nonetheless, because a tight-knit sense of community within each village has been reinforced by the isolation that results from basic geography – the only way to traverse Hong Kong’s third-largest, blessedly car-free and extremely hilly island is on foot or by bicycle.
“There is an openness and cosmopolitanism here that is different from the land-bound villages in the New Territories,” Leung says.
