Tsang Tak-ping`s "Hello! Hong Kong (Part 7)" was held at the Para/Site Art Space in Po Yan Street, Sheung Wan, between 20 May and 20 June 1997. This exhibition, as the title suggests, was very definitely conceived of as one part of a sequence. For that reason it is more difficult to analyse the show in isolation than would usually be the case. Each individual show in the "Hello! Hong Kong" sequence avoids the sense of offering a completed graspable meaning, positioning itself as one step in a process of analysis that may never reach a final state of completion. 

In Part 7 Tsang (as he has done before) recycled items which had been utilized in previous shows, but which were brought together in new (but often temporary-looking) conjunctures, with previously unexhibited objects included as well. One's knowledge that certain items have been used before influences one's approach to their present arrangement - they have an exhibition history for the regular viewer of his art. One also feels that the objects he chooses for inclusion in his installations may have a history outside their employment as recyclable art elements, and may in certain cases play a part in his everyday life or be heirlooms of some kind. In any case they tend to be objects that have a flavour of cultural history about them, they function as relics or indices of an earlier time and mode of life (albeit never too legibly). In the way in which he treats the exhibition space Tsang often recreates a quasi-private, quasi-domestic environment for the viewer's appreciation of his objects - as if att empting to recover a little of their lost context. He does this through the construction of spatial compartments, for instance. 

Part 7 was very much a site-specific work. The exhibition space, and not just the objects he brought into it, had a definite sense of history. It is clearly a former commercial space, situated near to other such spaces that are still in use, and traces of its former function were preserved by Tsang to constitute a part of the work. The area in which it is situated is an older part of town, but one which is being rapidly changed because of the encroachment of development and gentrification. A sense of the past and of its erasure was therefore already likely to be in one's mind before one even entered the exhibition space. Nearby is Hollywood Road, a street full of antique shops where the past is being recycled, and this again might have influenced the spectator's mindset. Also nearby is the site at which the British first landed in Hong Kong, Possession Point, recalled only in a street name (Possession Street) and not by any monument. The area also has personal associations for Tsang, as he was born nearby. 

On first entering the exhibit one might have had the feeling that the space was rather empty, and I think Tsang went for a relatively sparse installation partly in order to foreground the qualities of the space itself. Its inadvertent traces of the past were allowed to mingle with more advertent ones (that is, the changes he had made to the space, or the objects he had brought to the site). I think the sparseness also worked to keep a balance between attempts to reference the past and attempts to reference the past as absent. 

By approaching the past through personal, everyday objects and environments I think that Tsang is attempting to articulate a sense of Hong Kong history and identity. The text he published at the time of the exhibition shows that his concerns lie in this area, and that he is aware of the problems associated with projecting a Hong Kong cultural identity. Textbook history belongs to the British, or to the Chinese national story (to which Hong Kong`s history may so easily be assimilated now that sovereignty over the territory has passed from Britain to China). Buildings of `heritage` status are either colonial or `traditionally Chinese`. Perhaps only ordinary urban vernacular buildings such as the one Tsang is working with can evoke a sense of Hong Kongness. The items in the nearby antique shops are `Chinese` antiques, not Hong Kong relics, and high art offers no specific Hong Kong references that can be mobilized - the use of brush and ink, for instance, instantly marks out a work as `Chinese`. Popular cultural artifacts and objects of the everyday world offer more available props out of which a sense of Hong Kong identity may be constructed, and that I think is why Tsang has turned to them. He has also turned to folk culture. In Hello! Hong Kong (Part 7), for instance, he made use of a bamboo structure in the doorway which recalls the temporary structures constructed for Cantonese Opera performances associated with seasonal festivals (appropriate in that this work was also temporary). In addition he referenced the craft of producing lanterns with split-bamboo frames. The skills of this dying craft were employed to produce an image of a boat, symbolic perhaps of a fragile and rootless sense of home. 

David Clarke is Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Hong Kong. His most recent book is Art and Place: Essays on Art From a Hong Kong Perspective (Hong Kong University Press, 1996). A variant of this essay appeared in City Entertainment, No. 477, 24 July 1997, p112-3.