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The Osage Art Foundation’s impressive 15,000 square foot warehouse space in Kwun Tong recently became host to an exhibition inspired by Hong Kong’s entry for the 52nd Venice Biennale last year. Curated by Norman Ford, Tales From Venice is basically a reworking of the Venice show, Star Fairy, consisting of two separate large-scale installations by Hiram To and MAP Office (made up of the architecturally trained husband and wife team, Laurent Gutierrez and Valérie Portefaix). 

To’s enigmatic work, I Love You More Than My Own Death explores the dynamics of identity construction in a celebrity-obsessed world. Juxtaposing colourful life-size metallic constructions with photographic images and light boxes, he conjures up the lives of the late nineteenth century magicians Ching Ling Foo (who was Beijing born) and Ching Ling Soo (who was actually an American masquerading as a “marvellous Chinese conjurer”). To this he adds further references to the infamous scandal at the 1993 Venice Biennale, when the New York-based independent curator Christian Leigh performed his own disappearing act, leaving behind a trail of unpaid bills.

Both utilising and subverting prevalent architectural practices, MAP Office’s Concrete Jungle/A Parrot’s Tale redefines field research with its playful blend of text, drawing, photography and video; providing alternative mappings of the city and its wider relationship with mainland China. One of the highlights of the installation is a sprawling oysterscape, made up of crushed oyster shells scattered across the gallery floor in the shape of Hong Kong Island. A recurrent motif in their work, these shells come from large oyster farms in the New Territories that have over the years discarded millions of unwanted oyster shells into the sea; unwittingly producing a unique sedimentary landscape. Taking this form of reclamation as a metaphor for the territorial instabilities encountered in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region, these shells become powerful tools in MAP Office’s enquiries into the politics of place.

Tales From Venice clearly proves Hong Kong’s ability to play the game of putting itself on the cultural map on an international level, but runs the risk of becoming (and this is out of the hands of the artists and curators) yet another reified cultural artifact used by the tourism board to market “Asia’s World City”. Nevertheless, it is the show’s ability to problematise such issues that testifies to the current vibrancy of the Hong Kong cultural scene and the numerous possibilities that it affords.

Nadim Abbas