Artists Reveal Hong Kong Behind The Headlines

A child running across a tiled plaza. The sounds of martial arts movies. The simple geography of a clock in a train station, but upside-down, so that would-be passengers scurry across the ceiling. Two men perched unaccountably high on a scaffold.

These are all fragments of life captured in ​“Hong Kong In Poor Images,” an art exhibit at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art — running now until Feb. 16 — that gives New Haveners a look at the teeming, changing city that lets us go deeper than the global city’s recent headlines.

Hong Kong has been a constant fixture of the news for months because of the large protests in the city over of a proposed law allowing the extradition of suspects of crimes to mainland China. The law tapped into larger, fundamental questions about sovereignty that have shaped Hong Kong’s history at least since it was a British colony, and certainly since 1997, when Hong Kong was decolonized from Britain and transferred to China while retaining forms of self-government under what has become known as ​“one country, two systems.”

Underneath tensions between Hong Kong and mainland China, however, are tensions within Hong Kong itself, into which the Ely Center’s exhibit — presented in partnership with the Yale-China Association — offers a tantalizing, complicated glimpse. Kwok-hin Tang’s images in Don’t Blame the Blossom offer unvarnished street views of a place that, in the aggregate, is one of the wealthiest places in the world, but in Tang’s photographs is revealed as a place of inequality and sometimes fleeting urban beauty. There’s a man in a restaurant whose head captures the light in just such a way that he appears at first like a human lightbulb. A man, a ladder, two stools, and a wheelbarrow make an improbable line in a street. ​“These small gestures in everyday life seem to animate Hong Kong from its otherwise systematized state,” as curator Hong Zeng writes in an accompaying note.

Stella Tang helps exemplify what the exhibit means by ​“poor images,” that is, ​“low quality images that result from the digitization in today’s visual culture,” as Zeng writes. ​“Image production, which used to be state-owned, is becoming increasingly privatized,” which ​“gestures towards a democracy of image production, circulation, and appropriation.” Zeng explains that Tang ​“uses a digital camera to take photos of the people in the streets. Afterwards, she projects those images on canvas and repaints them in acrylic.”

The results are figures that on one level could show up in print advertisements for, well, just about anything. They reveal a great diversity of people walking the streets of this global financial center. But on another level the way they float together in blank white space feels haphazard and a little disconcerting. This dislocation is intentional; the project is Tang’s ​“artistic lamentation of the disappearing walking space in the city resulting from the deference to the global metropolis,” Zeng writes. Tang made her images in 2012, and one suspects that she was one Hong Kong resident who was not surprised when something managed to get her fellow citizens to take to the streets in protest.

Like Tang, Jamsen Sum-po Law takes to the streets to gather the material for his art, but while Tang manipulates her images, Law juxtaposes his short videos to make his point. Under his eye, connections are made between the tide flowing in and out of the harbor, clothes fluttering in the breeze, traffic moving along a thoroughfare, and people across a walkway. Tang’s work talks about how space is becoming constricted and more static. Law focuses on the city’s underlying rhythms, which can feel almost like natural forces. Law’s work dates from 2015, yet one suspects that like Tang, he might not be surprised to see the city erupt in protest, as an almost natural consequence of the forces that make the metropolis move. Were he to update his piece this year, it’s easy to imagine videos of the protests themselves being part of the work.

The videos from artists Linda Chiu-han Lai and Kalen Wing Ki Lee, meanwhile, find themselves in a space between Tang and Law, as the explore the limits of the power of Hong Kong’s government and the precarious way that the city is constantly growing at the cost of preserving its history. Both of their fragmented series images suggest a place that is hurtling into the future, pushed by the powerful forces of development and commerce. Hong Kong’s residents, willingly or not, are being pushed as well. Tensions appear within and without. And as the pieces in this fascinating exhibit suggest, the city remains in a deeper way ungraspable, even to the people who live there.

“Hong Kong In Poor Images” runs at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, 51 Trumbull St., through Feb. 16. Admission is free. Visit the Ely Center’s website for hours and more information.