At the Seams of the World: Gender and Decoloniality in Hong Kong Contemporary Art

Abstract

“At the Seams of the World: Gender and Decoloniality in Hong Kong Contemporary Art” examines the overlooked relationship between gender and decoloniality in Hong Kong that is visualised through transcultural and translingual examinations of contemporary art. Countering the marginal status of gender-related discourse in Hong Kong, this project unearths its political centrality by relating gender to Hong Kong’s colonial conditions. I articulate and theorise these colonial conditions through my concept of “compound coloniality,” which describes the confluence and compounded effects of British coloniality, Chinese coloniality, as well as Hong Kong’s own expressions of coloniality enacted by the city’s business elites, who have collaborated with both ruling powers. I analyse the work of artists from Hong Kong and its diaspora, including: Sin Wai Kin, Joyce Lung Yuet Ching, Elvis Yip Kin Bon, Beatrix Pang Sin Kwok, Tse Suk-ting, Sara, Jaffa Lam Laam, and Ivy Ma King Chu to surface the ways in which interlocking logics of gender, race, class, and sexuality have been utilised to constitute the city’s ideal subjects and structure its society for the perpetuation of rapacious capital accumulation. At the same time, this analysis also surfaces the ways in which these artists’ works have visualised decolonial ways of being that illuminate alternative horizons for Hong Kong—a city that has functioned as a critical node for the global spread of capitalism since the 1800s and has been conceptualised as a place where “East meets West.” The city’s artists, situated at this “seam” where “East meets West,” illuminate the realities and conditions of possibility that are elided within the seams of the world while envisioning the emergence of other worlds by tearing the fabric of coloniality apart at the seams.