Visual Arts

Our final exhibition assembles the ongoing research of Tiffany Chung and Koki Tanaka, enabled by their residencies at Spring in the past year. The pair of works unpack recent events from the ‘60s to the present in order to reveal histories of forgotten/marginalized events and of disregarded communities in Hong Kong.
As an extension of her ongoing research for the Hong Kong chapter of The Vietnam Exodus Project, Chung will exhibit archival materials and notes from her academic research and ethnographic fieldwork that excavate personal/collective histories and remap the now-erased spatial/historical narratives of the local Vietnamese refugee community in Hong Kong. As part of the presentation, Chung hosts a discussion between human rights lawyers and former Vietnamese refugees on Hong Kong’s asylum policies and the impact these continuously-shifting policies had upon their lives, in order to make visible the obliterated history and troubled domestic relationship with the displaced Vietnamese population from 1975 until now.
Continuing his research on the potential of temporary communities that arise in times of adversity, Koki Tanaka’s new work Precarious Tasks #9: 24hrs Gathering (Timeline) began with an invitation to eight participants in August to a 24-hour session at Spring when they jointly composed a possible timeline of Hong Kong’s social movements since the ‘60s. The resulting text piece interweaves their personal stories with a timeline of significant events in Hong Kong history. On show are threads extracted by Tanaka from the session, which re-imagine a collective memory and narrative of this city that finds itself in a constant state of socio-political discord.
As a moment of reflection before Spring’s planned respite begins in January at the end of its five-year life cycle, A Collective Present brings to the fore interrelated temporalities that give an account of Hong Kong’s recent past, often dismissed in the city’s perpetual quest for progress. By briefly dislocating us from the here and now, Chung and Tanaka’s manifestations offer poignant insights on how we might be able to act with collective awareness as humans in this tumultuous present.