Views on a Former Periphery: Hong Kong in the Contemporary Art World

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Views on a Former Periphery: Hong Kong

in the Contemporary Art World

Lara van Meeteren | 5835585

Master Thesis Art History (Contemporary Art)

University of Amsterdam

Faculty of Humanities

Supervisor: mw. dr. Marga van Mechelen

Second Examiner: mw. dr. Esther Peeren

Hong Kong | July 2017

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Abbreviations

ADC Arts Development Council CHC Cultural Heritage Commission

HKADC Hong Kong Arts Development Council HKD Hong Kong Dollar

ICC International Commerce Centre KAF K11 Art Foundation

LCSD Leisure and Cultural Services Department PMQ Police Married Quarters

SAR Special Administrative Region TST Tsim Sha Tsui

USD United States Dollar

WKCDA West Kowloon Cultural District Authority YBA Young British Artists

Remark on Names

Hong Kong is officially a bilingual territory, and English and Cantonese are official languages of equal status. However, many institutions, organisations and movements with Chinese names (like the New Ink Movement or the City Museum and Art Gallery) do not have a formal English translation. As a result, the translation of these names into English is often not consistent, and many similar but different forms can be found in publications. Wherever this is the case, I have aimed to use the most commonly used translations. Personal names also sometimes have different spellings and orders. In those cases, I have chosen to follow the spelling as used by the persons in question themselves.

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Summary

In this thesis I set out to understand the conditions for art production, consumption and mediation in Hong Kong, and by extension to reflect on the characteristics of my own Western understanding of art. Especially, I seek to answer the following research question: To what extent does Hong Kong’s particular modernity support a social

role of art? I address this question in four chapters. In the first chapter, I develop an

analytical framework that structures my discussion of Hong Kong. I start from the observation that artists from around the world are now exhibited in the West and beyond. However, visibility is not equality, as core characteristics of the Western idea of art still pervade the ‘globalised contemporary art world system’.1 This ‘orientalism’ is obscured, as those characteristics exist as implicit all-encompassing norms. I therefore continue to make the Western idea of art explicit, concluding that it is built around the dual core assumptions that art is an autonomous domain and that art works should be understood insulated from the influence of other practices; and that this autonomy of art is the result of a process of modernisation that started in Western Europe and will eventually take place elsewhere as well. As a consequence of this view, on the one hand art is decontextualised, while on the other hand, art that does not fit in the progression of the Western canon is derided, either as traditional or as a derivative.

Building on the work of Eistenstadt and Appudarai, as an alternative I suggest instead to think about art in terms of ‘multiple modernities’, and to be sensitive to variations in institutional practices and ideologies in each of these. This translates into the necessity of transfield discourse, in which each of the participants is open to the subjectivities of others. At the same time, this means that normative assumptions that are firmly rooted in separate histories and cultures of participants in this discourse should be made as explicit as possible. For me, that normative assumption centres on the idea that art needs to play a social role; or what I will call critical reflexivity. I stress that the question if art plays a social role is highly dependent on the specific art field under observation. I end this chapter discussing that various developments like neoliberalism, expediency and the growing influence of the market over the last

1_{Jonathan Harris, “Gatekeepers, Poachers and Pests in the Globalized Contemporary Art World}

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decades are undermining the autonomy of social fields in the West and beyond, resulting in an increasing proliferation of heterogeneous networks. Various authors warn that this is detrimental to the possibilities of a social role of art. I therefore conclude the chapter posing the empirical question if art that is produced in heterogeneous networks can play a social role.

I employ this theoretical framework to discuss the specific development of the Hong Kong art field. Chapter 2 discusses the history of the involvement of the Hong Kong government with art, within the context of its particular modernity that is structured by its colonial heritage, the primacy of economic development inside and outside of government, and its uncomfortable position vis-à-vis Mainland China. It becomes clear that British colonial government has never supported an autonomous art field and related conceptions of ‘critical reflexive’ art, as this might threaten its position. This aversion to the autonomy of art and its potential for critical reflexivity seems to have survived after the handover.

In chapter 3 I explore the consequences of this institutional setting for the critical and reflexive role of art, through an analysis of the contribution of art to critical reflections on a Hong Kong identity, one of the territory’s crucial social issues of the last decades. I argue that the art of the Hong Kong modernists was co-opted by the state to construct an identity from above; that the pre-handover art challenged this conception with an engagement with Hong Kong identity from below; and that the market is framing a Hong Kong identity from the outside, but now for commercial reasons. I conclude that Hong Kong’s formal institutions do not create a fertile climate for a social role of art, but that art nonetheless plays this role through multiple, albeit precarious, initiatives, supported by funding from the Arts Development Council (ADC).

Against the background of the conclusion that critical reflexive art is rather restricted within the confines of Hong Kong’s formal art institutions, in chapter 4 I wonder whether heterogeneous art events that are organised outside of these institutions provide alternative avenues for a social role of art. An exploratory analysis of three events – Chen Tianzhuo’s WAWADOLL (2014), Antony Gormley’s

Event Horizon (2015), and Add Oil Team’s Our 60-second friendship begins now

(2016) – suggests that the impediments for a social role of art in Hong Kong’s particular modernity often carry over to heterogeneous events through the actions of both government and business representatives within collaborations. However, at the

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same time, I conclude that all three events have produced critical reflexive art, because each time, one of the core participants supported such a role. I argue that art institutions especially play a lasting crucial role in the safeguarding of critical reflexivity in a future of art in heterogeneous networks after autonomy.

I conclude that in Hong Kong, the possibilities for a social role of art within formal art institutions are seriously limited as both government and economic elites are wary of this role, while the general public is not accustomed to it. At the same time, I conclude that nonetheless, critical reflexive art is produced and displayed, often however in unexpected places. This contributes to the illegibility of the art field in Hong Kong. In many familiar places that you would visit in the West, often you will not find critical reflexive art. However, on the other hand, unexpected places like shopping malls can and do host worthwhile art events, as the quality of these events entirely depends on the partners and alliances. Arguably, this will also increasingly be the future of the art fields in the former West.

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Introduction

A friend of mine said that art is a European invention2

Jimmie Durham When I first arrived in Hong Kong in 2012 it seemed to be an exciting time for the Hong Kong art world. The ambitious M+ museum for visual culture, scheduled to open in 2019, had just bought the Uli Sigg Collection of contemporary Chinese art and started to have an increasingly visible role in the city. Large international blue chip galleries like White Cube, Gagosian and Perrotin were setting up shop and the much-anticipated first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong was about to take place. In peripheral areas of the city, more experimental art spaces and galleries were opening in industrial buildings and Hong Kong-based artists were getting increased international exposure, for instance through the Hong Kong Eye exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London in December 2012 and the two year collaboration between Hong Kong’s non-profit art space Spring Workshop and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam.

Hong Kong’s increasing profile in the global art market as one of the largest art auction centres in the world also generated much attention. The commercial appeal of the city was obvious and it still is: as a tax-free gateway to China’s many billionaires, Hong Kong is the perfect base camp for galleries and auction houses. Around the turn of the century the results of Hong Kong’s branches of Christie’s and Sotheby’s hadn’t been significant, representing 2% of the global revenue in contemporary art at Christie’s and no more than 0.1% at Sotheby’s. But by 2013 it was clear that their perseverance had paid off, as Hong Kong represented respectively 13% and 16% of their contemporary art sales.3_{Hong Kong’s emergence as an} important global market place had been recent and rapid.

My initial reason to go to Hong Kong was the realisation that after many years of studying Western culture I had little to no idea about developments in other parts of the world. I arrived to analyse the Hong Kong art world and discover if and how it differed from its Western counterparts. Initially, I focused on funding, as discussions

2_{Jimmie Durham, “A Friend of mine said that Art was a European Invention,” in Global Visions:}

Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. Jean Fisher (London: Kala Press, 1994), 113.

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on cultural funding were high on the Dutch agenda. I was curious to see how this was organised in a city that is run like a business, reinforced by entrepreneurial government strategies, and where the real estate and financial sectors seems to call the shots. While navigating Hong Kong’s unfamiliar art scene, and becoming an active part of it through studies, research and work, I was increasingly confronted with the characteristics of my Western, even orientalist, perspective, and its inherent limits as well as its strengths. Gradually I was forced to adjust many of my assumptions and opinions. After an eye-opening interview with a collector of contemporary ink art, full of mutual misunderstandings, it dawned on me that I had to ‘provincialise’ Europe and start approaching the art world from the idea that the West is the periphery and Hong Kong the centre.

In the following chapters I will discuss what happens when the ‘globalised contemporary art world system’4 collides with a local art scene. I do so from the analytical assumption that this system links up a variety of art fields that are expressions of multiple modernities, relating to localised institutional settings, practices, languages and frameworks of understanding. However, in addition to such a pluralist analytical approach to art fields, I also argue for a normative position that defends a specific role of art: art as a critical reflexive practice with a social role in society, of which Samson Young’s Nothing we did could have saved Hong Kong it

was all wasted (2015) on the cover of this thesis is an example. My assumption is that

the characteristics of a ‘particular modernity’ (like Hong Kong) influence the extent to which art can play such a role. While recent developments inside and outside of art – increasing expediency, changes in consumption and production of art; the growth of the art market – have an impact on the role of art as well, I furthermore argue that this impact will differ between particular modernities. Against the background of these observations, in the coming chapters I will address the following research question: To what extent does Hong Kong’s particular modernity support a social role of art?

I seek to answer this question in four chapters. In the first chapter, I introduce a theoretical framework that will help to structure my discussion of Hong Kong as a former periphery that now firmly is a part of the global art world. Next, chapter 2 discusses the history of art institutions in Hong Kong against the background of the territory’s particular modernity and related colonial history. I conclude that both the

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British coloniser and China, the current sovereign, have never been supportive of art with a social role. Chapter 3 continues with an analysis of the contribution of art to critical discussion in three distinct periods of art production in Hong Kong, examining the contribution of art to ideas about a Hong Kong ‘identity’. While the territory’s formal institutions do not create a fertile climate for a social role of art, art nonetheless plays this role through multiple, albeit precarious, initiatives. Chapter 4 discusses three art events that took place outside traditional art institutions and were realised by networks of heterogeneous contributors. Against the grain of Hong Kong’s particular modernity, these initiatives turn out to offer some possibilities for a social role of art, provided that certain conditions are met. I conclude that these conditions, and not the emergence of heterogeneous events as such, should be central in future discussions about the social role of art.

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1. Art Fields in Flux

For the contemporary visitor of art exhibitions accustomed to see works from every corner of the world it is hard to imagine that not even thirty years ago things were very different. Hermetically closed to Non-Western5 artists, art institutions started to be criticised for their Eurocentrism. However, subsequent waves of internationalism, multiculturalism and identity politics certainly seem to have opened up spaces; spaces to be claimed by people from diverse backgrounds, and spaces in between previously static categories. Do we therefore live in a post-colonial, post-identity, or post-racial age? Most certainly not, Michelle Kuo argues: “we can’t pretend that we’re past those structures of identification that still shape and are shaped by experience, knowledge, and power.”6 Similarly, Derek Gregory compellingly argues that we do not yet live in a post-colonial era, as we are still haunted by traces of colonial history.7 Speaking from personal experience, living in Asia made me realise just how strongly Eurocentric remnants shape deeply engrained conceptions and normative ideas – for instance through my very Western arts education – and how difficult it is to move beyond this ‘habitus’. And while the West might be eager to move on, the former ‘Other’ understandably might disagree. Samson Young, who represents Hong Kong at the 2017 Venice Biennale, thus declares: “Stop telling me to stop dichotomizing the East and the West. I am not done yet. Stop dismissing my site of resistance.”8

A fundamental problem lies at the heart of these opposing positions. While the visibility of Non-Western artists in current exhibitions seems to illustrate that the art world is now open to former ‘Others’, it only is so on Western terms. For, as Amelia Jones stresses, “art history as a discipline remains remarkably conservative and has steadfast ideas about what art is supposed to be – all of which is steeped in its European foundations.”9_{As a result, internationalism, multiculturalism and identity}

5_{For lack of a better term, I will use ‘Non-West’ when referring to those parts of the world that were}

considered to be in the ‘periphery’ not too long ago; the much used ‘Global South’ does not really make sense when talking about Hong Kong. I will furthermore use a capital ‘N’ to put the ‘Non-West’ on equal footing with the ‘West’.

6_{Michelle Kuo, editorial in Art and Identity. Special issue of Artforum 54 (Summer 2016), accessed}

July 2, 2017, https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201606&id=60094.

7_{Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 1-16.} 8_{Samson Young, “Artists and Identity,” Artforum 54 (Summer 2016).}

9_{Jacqueline Bishop, “Renowned feminist art historian Amelia Jones believes that the discipline of art}

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politics all developed within a Western institutional framework, and inclusion hinges on a specific conception of the art world. Kobena Mercer therefore wonders “[w]hether we are really post-identity or whether we’re actually being administered by inclusion.”10 As a result of such arguments, while identity politics are back – or better – back in view, things have changed as well. Crudely, I would say that the tone has shifted from ‘I’m here too, can I please join?’ to ‘Who the f*** do you think you are?’ Kara Keeling phrases it more graciously: “I think that there is an extension of identity politics that’s starting to open up a divergent way – we [as formerly excluded voices] might even begin to imagine how the world might be organized and who or what would be included in that”11 (italics LvM). If, as Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests, in the process we ‘provincialise’ Europe,12 we start to see Europe as just another region, and we will no longer grant its concepts and ideas, helpful as they may be, privilege over other ways of being in the world.

If my conception of art is not as universally valid as I thought when arriving in Hong Kong, it might not be sufficient to understand the Hong Kong art field either. In this chapter I therefore seek to develop an alternative conceptual framework to guide my analysis of art in Hong Kong. I will first set the stage with a discussion of the stubborn hegemony of the Western idea of art. Next, I analyse some core characteristics of this idea, discussing what Gregory eloquently calls “the stories that the West most often tells about itself.”13_{An examination of the detrimental effects of} this idea for ‘other’ practices then results in an argument for a perspective that focuses on ‘mulitple modernities’ and related visions of art outside of the centre. However, in addition to this pluralist analytical approach to art fields, I also argue for a normative position that defends a specific role of art in society: art as a critical reflexive practice with a social role. I will finish the chapter with a discussion of recent developments that potentially undermine such a role, arguing that their impact might be less detrimental in particular modernities; for instance in Hong Kong.

21, 2016, accessed July 2, 2017, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jacqueline-bishop/renowned-feminist-art-his_b_9038984.html.

10_{Huey Copeland, Emily Roydson, Kara Keeling, Michelle Kuo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, David Joselit,}

and Kobena Mercer, “Collective Consciousness. A Roundtable,” Artforum 54 (Summer 2016), accessed July 2, https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201606&id=60095.

11_Ibid.

12_{Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New}

Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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17 1.1 Global Art beyond Centre-Periphery?

In 1989, the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris showed the work of fifty artists from the Western world alongside fifty Non-Western artists. Criticised for exoticising ‘Third World’ artists by some, it was equally applauded as a transformative first step to open institutions that up till then had been closed to outsiders. Alfredo Jaar, one of the participating Non-Western artists, in hindsight identified this “first crack in the Western art bunker” as a point of no return.14_Little over a decade earlier, Edward Said’s seminal Orientalism had exposed the uneven power structures between the West and the Rest of the world, showing that the desire to classify, structure and thereby dominate the Other was deeply engrained in Western society.15 Strongly influenced by these arguments, Rasheed Araeen, another artist that participated in Magiciens de la Terre, would establish Third Text in 1987, just two years before the Magiciens exhibition. The journal’s subtitle, Third World

Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, left little doubt about its aim: “Third

Text represents a historical shift away from the centre of the dominant culture to its periphery in order to consider the centre critically.”16

Upon first view, the Western art world and its institutions slowly seemed to have taken this criticism to heart. The work of artists from all over the world has been increasingly exhibited in the West and beyond. This growing presence of artists from the former ‘periphery’ could have been viewed as an enrichment of the existing, predominantly Western, art history. However, Hans Belting suggests that it might not always be easy to accept for “Western art criticism”, especially because it is “wishful thinking to keep [global art] under Western guidance and within the precincts of familiar institutions.”17 Similarly, according to Peter Weibel – interestingly speaking of ‘they’ instead of ‘we’ – this might not be easy for a society that is accustomed to a certain status quo:

14_{Jelle Bouwhuis in conversation with Alfredo Jaar, “Cracks in the Western art bunker,” in PROJECT}

1975 Contemporary Art and the Postcolonial Unconscious (Amsterdam: SMBA Publishing, 2014),

133.

15_{Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).}

16_{Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning. Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,”}

epilogue in The Third Text Reader: On Art, Culture, and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen (London: Continuum, 2002), 333.

17_{Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate,” in The Global Art World:}

Audiences, Markets, and Museums, ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz,

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Now, for the first time they find themselves in the situation – or at least potentially in a situation – where other states determine who is included and excluded. (..) This is creating unrest and anxiety in the West.18

In view of such anxiety, it is perhaps not surprising that the West has developed strategies to effectively neutralise Otherness. Julian Stallabrass, for instance, quotes Žižek in arguing that the West “is only comfortable with otherness as long as it is not really other”.19_{Many authors, like Gerardo Mosquera, also have expressed concern} about the existence of an international style that functions as a prerequisite for acceptance on the global stage of contemporary art – and by extension as a new exclusion mechanism.20

There is no questioning the fact that artists from around the world are now visible on the international stage of contemporary art. The extent to which the resulting reality is based on equality, however, is clearly up for debate. After all, as Araeen reminds us, visibility is by no means the same as equality:

Multiculturalism is not about the equality of all cultures but how the dominant culture can accommodate those who have no power in such a way so that the power of the dominant is preserved.21

The thought that the present situation might still be haunted by the spectre of Orientalism looms large, and Said’s words inevitably spring to mind:

Orientalism depends for its strategy on this flexible positional superiority, which puts the westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.22

Former West, the title and theme of a long-term research project initiated by

Utrecht based art space BAK in 2008, offers a striking insight into the resulting dilemmas. Criticising the idea that the position of the West could somehow remain the same after the end of the Cold War, it argues that the West should also fundamentally reconsider its position. Similarly, Araeen suggests that “postcoloniality is the condition of both: those who were once the colonizer and the colonized, and only when we recognize this can we establish a new relationship based on human

18_{Peter Weibel, “Globalization and Contemporary Art,” in The Global Contemporary and the Rise of}

New Art Worlds, ed. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2013), 20.

19_{Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated. The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University}

Press, 2004) 70.

20_{Gerardo Mosquera, “Beyond Anthropophagy: Art, Internationalization, and Cultural Dynamics,” in}

Belting, Global Contemporary, 237.

21_{Araeen, “A New Beginning,” 341.} 22_{Said, Orientalism, 7.}

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equality.”23_{In 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that this is only possible if ‘we’} ‘provincialise Europe’: a decentring of “an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in clichéd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought.”24 And possibly, the invisibility that comes with these ‘received ideas’ accommodates the endurance of Western hegemony. For, as Russell Ferguson argues that

[i]n our society dominant discourse tries never to speak its own name. Its authority is based on absence. The absence is not just that of the various groups classified as ‘other’, although members of these groups are routinely denied power. It is also the lack of any overt knowledge of the specificity of the dominant culture, which is simply assumed to be the all-encompassing norm. This is the basis of its power.25

Taking this into account, it is clear that an attempt to overcome the existing Western hegemony, for instance in discussions about art, has to make the assumptions behind the Western discourse visible, so that it can no longer pose as the implicit norm, oblivious of its own constitution.

1.2 Stories that the West Tells about Itself

How to characterise the Western idea of art? Obviously, there is no unambiguous answer to this immense question. However, here I want to argue that it is possible to distil at least two interrelated ‘stories’, central to this conception of art, that each hide implicit norms, namely autonomy, and the supposed universality of a temporal concept of modernity. Since hidden assumptions often can be seen more clearly from a distance than from the centre, I start the discussion of these ‘stories’ through the work of two non-Western critics of the Western idea of art: Okwui Enwezor and Gao Minglu. To start with autonomy, in The Postcolonial Constellation, Enwezor criticises contemporary international curatorial practices as an extension of the hegemony of the Western art conception. He illustrates the core of this conception through a discussion of the curatorial ideas behind the display of Tate Modern’s permanent collection at its opening in 2000, coincidentally overseen by then director Lars Nittve, who we will meet again in Chapter 2. Approvingly Enwezor discusses the decision to break with a chronological presentation, which would be inadequate in

23_{Rasheed Araeen, “Art and Postcolonial Society,” in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed.}

Jonathan Harris (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 366.

24_{Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4.}

25_{Russell Ferguson, “Introduction: Invisible Center,” in Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures,}

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today’s heterogeneous, post-colonial setting. At the same time he objects to the persistent suggestion of continuity; seeking to connect modern and contemporary art, the artworks on display are presented as logical heirs to other works in the Western art tradition. Hereby, the presentation reinforces the assumption that the only valid way to interpret art objects is through its own – Western – art context. This, he argues is “typical of the cynicism towards any socially and historically determined analysis of the object of discourse in a museum of modern art.”26_{Taking the example of the} display of African sculpture in Western institutions, Enwezor continues that, as a result, “non-Western objects (..) first must shed their utilitarian function and undergo a conversion from ritual objects of magic to reified objects of art.”27

For Enwezor, this epitomises one of the core characteristics of the Western idea of art: that art is, and should be, autonomous from other social domains. Not surprisingly, therefore, autonomy is the cornerstone of various well-known Western art theories. Take, for instance, Clement Greenberg, Theodor Adorno or George Dickie who each present autonomy as the core of their understanding of art by demarcating its inside and outside, albeit clearly in very different ways.28 This relates to the idea of art as a separate domain, that interacts with and comments on the external world, while being relatively autonomous to make value judgements free from any instrumentalised notion of art and culture, as art should not have to adhere to any externally determined purpose.

Taking a step back, it becomes evident that this idea of art as a separate, autonomous domain relates to another big story that the West tells about itself, namely structural differentiation as the fundamental characteristic of Western modernity. According to Ulrich Beck, sociologists such as Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann see modern Western society as the outcome of a process where “the political sphere splits off from the economic one, the scientific sphere from the political one, and so on.”29_{For Niklas Luhmann, art is just one autonomous social} ‘subsystem’ amongst many. He argues that these ‘closed’ subsystems function

26_{Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent}

Transition,” Research in African Literatures 34, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 61.

27_Ibid.

28_{For a further discussion on different usages of the concept autonomy in art, see for instance: Andrea}

Fraser, “Autonomy and Its Contradictions,” Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain, May 1, 2012, accessed July 16, 2016, http://onlineopen.org/autonomy-and-its-contradictions.

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according to their own laws or ‘binary codes’.30_{In an alternative analysis, Pierre} Bourdieu depicts structural differentiation as a process of the emergence of relatively autonomous ‘fields’, one of which is the art field. These fields translate into the ‘habitus’ of social actors operating in these fields: embodied dispositions that structure how social actors perceive the world and guide their actions. In The Field of

Cultural Production,31 Bourdieu shows that the literary field displays a historical tendency towards autonomy, which translates into specific codes of conduct of those invested in this field. In the wider field of art, such ‘rules of the game’ for instance include ideas about professional roles and appropriate locations to show art.32

Structural differentiation as foundational characteristic of modern society links the birth of autonomous art to a standardised process. Enter Gao Minglu, who in Total

Modernity states that Western “‘modernity’ is about a historical time and epoch”,

dividing human history in pre-modern, modern and post-modern periods. This temporal division corresponds with the use of concepts such as ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, which in the West became shorthand for ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress’ respectively.33 For Eisenstadt, theories of modernisation “all assumed, even if only implicitly, that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies.”34 As this succession of epochs was presented as a universal roadmap for social progress, everything that was non-modern – i.e. different from Western modernity – became automatically pre-modern. Or, as Jameson suggests in A Singular Modernity, the non-modern “is unavoidably drawn back into a force field in which it tends to connote the ‘pre-modern’ exclusively.”35 Western modernisation thus came to be regarded as a universal process, a necessary trajectory that every society would follow. This is what Chakrabarty calls “the ‘first in

30_{Francis Halsall, “Niklas Luhmann,” in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Diarmuid Costello and}

Jonathan Vickery (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 187.

31_{Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York:}

Columbia University Press, 1984), 33.

32_{Both Bourdieu and Luhmann argue that in modern Western society, the autonomy of art is not an}

exception but rather the rule. But while Luhmann postulates autonomy as a necessity, Bourdieu provides an empirical description and his framework is open to the historical possibility of a diminishing autonomy of art and the crossing of boundaries between fields. As a result, Bourdieu’s framework is more useful for analysing multiple modernities (see section 1.3), as well as processes of structural integration that, as I will conclude in section 1.6, characterise the last decades.

33_{Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth-century Chinese Art (Cambridge,}

MA: MIT Press, 2011), 2.

34_{S.N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, no. 1, (Winter 2000): 1.}

35_{Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso,}

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Europe and then elsewhere’ structure of time”, which automatically relegates places that are ‘not yet’, or only partially, modern to the “imaginary waiting room of history.”36 This must sound very familiar to people accustomed to the discourse on emerging art worlds that supposedly do not ‘yet’ have a ‘mature art eco-system’. It makes clear that the seemingly innocent demand for art’s autonomy inadvertently results in the not so innocent demand that others should follow the same path towards Western modernity, as they are otherwise ‘immature’ or ‘traditional’. In other words, these core ideas of Western art are logically connected sides of the same coin.

1.3 Debunking Universality

What are the shortcomings of this framework when encountering global art in its myriad forms? According to Enwezor, the Western requirement that art should be autonomous from other social domains is problematic because it renders other layers of meaning in artistic production invisible; after all, in the Western mind, art has to be regarded separate from the religious, moral, political, etc. As a result, Western approaches to Non-Western art, like African sculpture, hardly ever seem to move beyond formal aesthetic analysis. The Western mind, for instance, finds it hard to accommodate an understanding of the relationship between brushstroke and the moral superiority of the artist, which is an important element of the practice of Chinese ink art and its interpretation.

Enwezor implicitly exposes one of the core problems of the initial multiculturalism in Western art institutions: open for art from any region, it still required autonomy. Anne Ring Petersen accentuates the inherent contradiction between these two: institutional multiculturalism’s appeal for a “critical analysis of Western art institutions and art history with a view to disclosing their ethno-centric and racist structures and practices” clashes with the “call for a greater focus on art as significant in itself, not just as a vehicle for identity politics or for cultural and anthropological concerns (..).” She elaborates:

[t]he first one articulates a demand for revolutionary changes in the practices and structures of the Western art institutions from a position in postcolonial theory and multicultural identity politics. Contrary to this, the second evokes a fundamentally Western ideal of autonomous art.37

36_{Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8.}

37_{Anne Ring Petersen, “Identity Politics, Institutional Multiculturalism, and the Global Artworld,”}

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Enwezor argues that the inability to look beyond the art context – anchored in the Western history of art – still informs international curatorial practice. This is problematic, since “the conditions of production and reception of contemporary art evince a dramatic multiplication of its systems of articulation to the degree that no singular judgment could contain all its peculiarities.”38

James Elkins uses similar arguments in Chinese Landscape Painting as

Western Art History. He stresses that we cannot do justice to Non-Western art,

because we still perceive it through the framework of Western art history: “[t]he entire interpretive apparatus of contemporary art historical scholarship is demonstrably Western.”39 As a result, “[t]he project of writing art history is Western, and so any history of Chinese landscape painting is partly but fundamentally a Western endeavour, even if it is written by a Chinese historian, in Chinese, for Chinese readers.”40 Elkins’ antagonistic tone is likely to offend, but that does not deny the fact that he makes valid points. Especially enlightening is his reference to the practice of comparison, including “any terms, theories, or ideas that are taken to help elucidate an unfamiliar art.”41 With this reference Elkins raises the issue of transcultural discussions. While some might feel that comparison is inherent to such discourse, for Elkins “comparison probably says less about recurring patterns of art history across cultures than about patterns that Western art historical practice automatically finds in other cultures.”42_{In other words, Elkins exposes art historical} practice as a continuous Rorschach test; our not so innocent eye does not find inherent ‘true’ parallels between artworks in different contexts, but creates those through ‘projection’. We see what we know.

The painful consequence of the projection of preconceived worldviews is that ‘alien’ objects are either traditional (and thereby irrelevant) or a derivative. The reception of the 2016 exhibition of Bhupen Khakhar in Tate Modern illustrates this clearly. Khakhar is a highly regarded modernist painter in his native India. However, in a review in the Guardian, rife with comparisons of Khakhar’s work to Western predecessors and contemporaries, Jonathan Jones is clearly unable to look beyond the established trajectories of art in Europe and America, when he wonders: “Why is Tate

38_{Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation,” 69.}

39_{James Elkins, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong}

University Press, 2010), 140.

40_{Ibid,, 57.} 41_Ibid.,10. 42_{Ibid., 5.}

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Modern exhibiting an old-fashioned, second-rate artist whose art recalls the kind of British painters it would never let through its doors?”43 The review caused an outcry from the entire Indian art establishment. Geeta Kapur, the grande dame of Indian art criticism who has been criticising the universalising thrust of the Western conception of modernism for decades, countered that Jones was “(still) writing like a provincial Englishman. (..) Using discarded art historical categories, he repeats (by rote) well-enshrined modernist criteria and yet claims partisanship with advanced art that should, he says, be the remit of the Tate Modern.”44 Perhaps, the Western kneejerk ‘been there done that’ reaction needs to be reconsidered. Maybe the significance of Bhupen Khakhar’s work in India is more relevant than its possible resemblance to art works in other contexts, which is foregrounded by the Western history of art. After all, it is very likely that a work of art that resembles something familiar to a Western eye has a completely different connotation in its original context.

On top of this, for others ‘our’ Western canonical examples of high art might seem to be derivatives as well, unsophisticated even when compared to other art practices. Take a look at cubism, for instance, through the eyes of a practitioner of African sculpture; would they not miss finesse in the crude renditions of Picasso and Braque? And would a calligraphy expert not be dismayed by Van Gogh’s Japanese inspired Hiroshige paintings, as I started to realise after an offhand remark by a young Taiwanese artist.45_{When such criticism is directed at ‘our’ masterpieces, we tend to} argue that ‘they’ miss the point of these works. But why then, would ‘we’ be exempted from missing a point somewhere else? Clearly, transcultural encounters without situated contextual enquiry are inadequate, and worse, reinforcing power structures.

There is another important problem that relates to the Western belief in a universal progression of art according to the modern/traditional dichotomy: the impossibility to come to terms with the ‘traditional’ in modern or contemporary art, in subject matter, style or medium. Thus, Gao Minglu argues that

43_{Jonathan Jones, “Bhupen Khakhar review – Mumbai’s answer to Beryl Cook,” The Guardian, May}

31, 2016, accessed July 2, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/31/bhupen-khakhar-review-you-cant-please-all-tate-modern.

44_{Geeta Kapur, “Guardian Review of Bhupen Khakhar at Tate Narrow-Minded: Geeta Kapur,” The}

Wire, June 5, 2016, accessed July 2, 2017,

https://thewire.in/40568/guardian-review-of-bhupen-khakhar-at-tate-narrow-minded-geeta-kapur/.

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[u]sing these categories [modern versus traditional], the history and art of Third World countries has been judged against the principle of Euro-American modernity and reduced to either old or new, past or future. As a result, negative judgments on modern and contemporary non-western literature and art (..) are ubiquitous in studies of these fields.46

Or, as Jonathan Hay adds: “[t]he Rest – as the nonmodern/premodern – is assigned the false subjecthood of the traditional, which in its diverse forms either evacuates history or makes it finite.”47

Together, these arguments paint a grim picture of the consequences of the Western idea of art for the reception of Non-Western art: 1) the Western idea denounces ‘art’ that extends beyond the boundaries of the art system, and is thus incapable to do other practices that have such linkages justice; 2) it interprets Non-Western artworks from its own history, and is thus incapable to do those artworks justice; and 3) it condemns tradition as a source to develop alternative identities, and is thus again incapable to do other practices justice. Clearly, the often-implicit Western idea of art stands in the way of productive transcultural discussions.

1.4 Colliding Art Fields

Up until this point, I have spoken in detail about the Western conception of modernity on the one hand, and a generic ‘bloc’ resisting this modernity on the other. However, when distancing ourselves from the hegemonic Western world view, it becomes clear that this world of resisting ‘Others’ is evidently made up of highly diverse cultures, peoples and practices. I follow Eisenstadt in arguing that this kaleidoscopic world should be interpreted as a constellation of ‘multiple modernities’. Eisenstadt argues that structural differentiation has transformed most societies from traditional to modern, but he stresses that this has created a diversity of institutional patterns and related practices. In contradistinction to conceived Western ideas of what ‘being modern’ entails, for Eisenstadt these other patterns are distinctively modern as well: “Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others.”48 Eisenstadt’s position infers that none of these modernities should be a-priori

46_{Gao, Total Modernity, 2.}

47_{Jonathan Hay, “Double Modernity, Para-Modernity,” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity,}

Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, and Terry Smith (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2009), 113-114.

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privileged over others. There should be openness to other modernities, and a willingness to understand those modernities as empirical realities. This does not mean that we cannot judge other modernities. From our own normative beliefs we can certainly do so; but no judgement can be seen as a-priori correct. Eisenstadt adds that the relationship between particular modernities and the original Western project is usually ambivalent, for while the original Western project constituted the crucial reference point, at the same time “many movements that developed in non-Western societies articulated strong anti-Western or even anti-modern themes.”49

Eisenstadt’s attention for the relations between multiple modernities can be further explored through Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of globalisation. Writing in the early stages of the globalisation debate in the 1990s, Appudarai argues that

[t]he new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries).50

In Appadurai’s mind, there is no pre-determined direction of the travel of practices, objects or ideas. Instead, he suggests thinking of global culture in terms of flows that relate to each other in continuously changing constellations and that are fundamentally context dependent. Ever since globalisation appeared on the radar of academia there has been debate about its presumed homogenising effect on culture, which was often seen as ‘Americanisation’ or ‘commodification’ – which would be in line with a centre-periphery model. Appadurai addresses these fears when he writes:

What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or another way (..).51

In other words, as soon as global practices ‘land’ somewhere they are ‘molded’ to fit in with the receiving context. Appadurai’s attention for this ‘travel’ of ‘forces’ is very useful when analysing ‘Other’ places like Hong Kong, as it makes clear that certain practices, objects or notions have different meanings in different parts of the world. Combining the work of Eisenstadt and Appudarai, I thus argue that the new constellation should be seen as a multitude of modernities, and that flows of ‘forces’ travel between them, while landing in specific local ways.

49_{Ibid., 2}

50_{Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions in Globalization (Minneapolis:}

University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32.

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What do the concepts of multiple modernities and flows imply for art? Borrowing Bourdieu’s terminology, the consequence is that there is not just one international art field, but instead a multiplicity of art fields in different places around the world. Hans Belting makes a similar observation, when he writes that

[t]he last remaining stronghold of the Western art concept is the notion of a single and independent art world which is believed to survive even today as a global art world, again in the singular. But, in fact, this belief is contradicted by the recent emergence of several art worlds that coexist and compete in the wake of the global practice of contemporary art.52

With Eisenstadt we understand that “the ways in which these [art fields are] defined and organized varie[s] greatly, in different periods of their development, giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns.” 53 With Appudarai, it becomes clear that the history of Western art is still very relevant for these Non-Western art fields since its ideas and institutions have travelled and become indigenised. In other words, upon landing in specific places, Western ideas and institutions have taken on their own shape and meaning as they were ‘fit into’ the situation on the ground. It is in this way, that Dipesh Chakrabarty does not reject the existing (European) framework of knowledge entirely because it is “at once both indispensable and inadequate (..) and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought – which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all – may be renewed from and for the margins.”54

For practices in the Non-West, there is a dual quality when embracing Western elements that makes it less or more desirable depending on one's positionality. A discussion of some examples from the Chinese art field can help to illustrate. As Wu Hung writes, in 1980s China the embracing of Western practices functioned as a subversive gesture. By rejecting painting and adopting an international (i.e. Western) art language through the use of other media, artists at that time were able to establish an ‘outside’ position, independent of Chinese official and academic art. This was empowering “because what they reject[ed was] not just a particular art form or medium but an entire art system, including education, exhibition, publication,

52_{Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, “From Art World to Art Worlds,” in Belting, Global}

Contemporary, 28.

53_{Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 2.} 54_{Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 16.}

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and employment.”55_{However, a very different picture emerges when we look at the} reception within China about a decade later of cynical realism and political pop, two styles that incorporated Western elements as well. As Gao Minglu writes, this “facile combination of socialist propaganda and consumerist symbols (..) has been criticized as opportunistic by many Chinese artists and art critics.”56 In different periods, Western practices have thus clearly played different roles in Chinese art, resulting in different receptions.

Furthermore, the latter example also illustrates misreadings arising from exchanges between people functioning in different art fields (or what I call ‘transfield’ exchanges), involving processes of what Wu Hung calls ‘decontextualisation’ and ‘recontextualisation’.57 In the Western world, art works belonging to the cynical realism and political pop styles are consistently seen as “representatives of an ‘underground’ or ‘dissident’ art under a communist regime.”58 As Gao Minglu’s above quote clearly illustrates, this view is not at all shared by Chinese art world insiders, including Wu Hung and Carol Yinghua Lu.59 This discrepancy in the reception of political pop and cynical realism between the West and China illustrates the difficulty of transfield discussions. The picture is further complicated when we realise that the subversive gesture of the embrace of a Western art language ‘at home’, like the 1980s era Chinese art, is easily lost when this art comes into contact with the larger ‘international’ art world.60

Apart from substantive aspects of art, the modern idea of art as a differentiated field and its related institutions such as museums have travelled as well. Again, these travelled institutions cannot be taken at face value, as they are also ‘molded into’ the context in which they land. Curator and critic Carol Yinghua Lu gives multiple examples of Western art world institutions and practices that have been adopted in

55_{Wu Hung, “A Case of Being “Contemporary”: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary}

Chinese Art,” in Contemporary Art in Asia. A Critical Reader, ed. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 391-414, 399.

56_{Mónica Amor et al., “Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local,” Art Journal 57, no. 4}

(1998): 38.

57_{Wu, “Case of Being “Contemporary”,” 402-405.} 58_{Ibid., 404.}

59_{See for instance Wu Hung (ibid.) and Carol Yinghua Lu, “From the Anxiety of Participation to the}

Process of De-Internationalization,” in e-flux journal 70 (February 2016), accessed July 2, 2017, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60556/from-the-anxiety-of-participation-to-the-process-of-de-internationalization/.

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China in name, but in reality are not what you would expect from a Western standpoint:

[t]hroughout the past two decades, under the influence of the art market, an infrastructure for contemporary art has slowly taken shape. Yet although it bears all the familiar characteristics of a mature art system – with galleries, contemporary art museums, art magazines, collections, art centers, archives, and so on – a lot of them are just forms without real substance.61

She adds other examples of the skewed relations in the field: art magazines without critical content; art museums without curatorial ambitions that mostly rent out space; triennials that are founded and curated by private gallerists in order to enhance the reputation of the artists that they represent; and art historians that have questionable motives when compiling handbooks for Chinese contemporary art.62 Clearly, it will not be very helpful to use a Western frame of reference when navigating the Chinese art field, as then nothing is what it seems.

1.5 The Social Role of Art

Transfield discourse necessitates an empirical curiosity in others and thereby an openness to difference. As anybody accustomed to such discourse will probably confirm, and as the examples of the previous sections clearly illustrate, in itself this is difficult enough. From personal experience, I have realised that transcultural discourse is especially challenging as this empirical openness to others needs to be negotiated with sometimes dearly held normative positions, which are firmly grounded in one’s own history and culture. After all, without such positions it becomes hard to say anything meaningful at all. Stated differently: How do I marry my empirical interest in the particular modernity of Hong Kong and related artistic practices with normative positions about the role and functioning of art? Such questions have to be asked by all participants to transfield discourse, in a situation that is highly charged by a very recent history of Western hegemony, reminding us of Samson Young’s understandably angry quote in the introduction to this chapter.

Of course, the question about my normative position necessitates an answer, as this answer will also determine my treatment of the development of art in Hong Kong in the following chapters. In response, I go back to the argument of Chakrabarty

61_{Carol Yinghua Lu, “Back to Contemporary: One Contemporary Ambition, Many Worlds,” e-flux}

journal 11 (December 2009), accessed July 2, 2017,

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61349/back-to-contemporary-one-contemporary-ambition-many-worlds/.

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in the previous section, that European thought is at once inadequate and indispensible. It is inadequate because particular modernities are expressions of ideas and structures that the hegemonic Western discourse disregards; but it is also indispensible as Western modernity as a travelled practice is in different ways now everybody’s heritage and affects us all. Following this position, I argue that my analysis of Hong Kong, on which I report in the following chapters, needs to start from a fundamental bracketing of my own position and concurrent openness to the positions of equal others; but at the same time, I also have to explicitly formulate my normative positions as input to an open conversation. In short, while approaching Hong Kong’s art field with an open gaze, I also need to clearly formulate my own departure point.

For me, that departure point is the Adornian idea that art should function autonomously from outside influences – political, economic, etc. – so that it can reflect on the state of society and thus realise its critical potential. Broadly supported over time, recently this idea – to which I refer using the shorthand terms ‘social role of art’ and ‘critical reflexivity’ – continues to receive attention. Brian Holmes, for instance, argues that “[a]rt can offer a chance for society to collectively reflect on the imaginary figures it depends upon for its very consistency, its self-understanding.”63 Chantal Mouffe makes it more political, arguing that artists

can play an important role in the hegemonic struggle by subverting the dominant hegemony and by contributing to the construction of new subjectivities.64

Political or not, the degree to which art plays a social role is directly dependent on the specific art field within which it is produced, consumed and mediated, and its social role therefore has to be discussed from a contextualised understanding. Art that plays a social role in one context might be rather irrelevant in another. The idea of the importance of a social role of art might have originated in Western Europe, but with Chakrabarty it is also clear that it is now our common heritage. Can we renew this idea from the margins and see if and how it can play a meaningful role in a former periphery like Hong Kong; especially at a time, when, as I discuss in the following section, this critical role might be under siege?

63_{Brian Holmes, “Artistic autonomy and the communication society,” Third Text 18, no. 6 (2004): 549.} 64_{Chantal Mouffe, “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,” Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas,}

Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (2007), accessed July 2, 2017,

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33 1.6 Art after Structural Integration

While the particular modernity of specific art fields influences the extent to which art can play a social role, various recent developments inside and outside of art influence this as well. Specifically, various authors observe a growing focus on the utility of art for other domains. Art is presented as a means to help cities become global, to improve urban economies through creative industries, to enhance social cohesion, or to brand and sell products. In The Expediency of Culture George Yúdice suggests that this is a universal development: “culture is invoked to solve problems that previously were the province of economics and politics.”65 On top of this, following budget cuts, traditional art institutions increasingly ‘professionalise’ their operations, for instance by shifting attention towards exhibitions that provide ‘experiences’ for large audiences. These changes are also stimulated by the growing influence of the art market. As the logics of economic thought have gradually crept into the entire art field, the codes of conduct in the art field are fundamentally changed. Drawing parallels with Chiapello and Boltanski’s New Spirit of Capitalism, Claire Bishop argues that especially for the ‘post-studio site-responsive artist’ and ‘the roving global curator’

a successful project is not one that has intrinsic value, but one that allows the worker to integrate him/herself into a new project afterwards; in other words, a good project is one that is generative of further projects through the connections he/she has established.66

For Isabelle Graw this coincides with changes in arts education, as the emphasis has shifted from autonomous art production to marketing and professionalisation.67 In such a goal- and profit-oriented environment, artistic autonomy is no longer the leading motive while creation for the market has lost its stigma.68

Paradoxically, as a consequence of these developments art now seems to be everywhere. Boundaries between art and other domains that were carefully built over time are disappearing, for instance between the museum store, art gallery and luxury good shop. It also becomes harder to discern artworks from luxury goods, political

65_{George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham: Duke}

University Press, 2003), 1.

66_{Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso,}

2012), 215-216.

67_{Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture (Berlin: Sternberg Press,}

2009), 84.

68_{Isabelle Graw, “In the Grip of the Market? On the Relative Heteronomy of Art, the Art World, and}

Art Criticism,” in Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions

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instruments, entertainment experiences, economic commodities and branding tools. Of course, the art field is not the only social domain experiencing a transgression of boundaries. While, as I discussed in section 1.2, social scientists in the West initially presented the emergence of differentiated social domains as the result of modernisation, in recent decades they started to stress that we are now experiencing processes of functional or structural dedifferentiation (also called coordination or integration). According to Ulrich Beck, for instance, we have entered a new stage of ‘reflexive modernisation’, in which modern social forms are being transformed themselves:

The questions of functional differentiation are replaced by the questions of

functional coordination, cross-linking, harmonization, synthesis, and so on. (..)

The way systems of activity are delineated becomes problematic because of the consequences it produces. Why does one delimit science from economics, economics from politics or politics from science in this way, and why can they not be intermeshed and ‘sectioned’ any other way in regard to tasks and responsibilities? (..) Empirically considered, does modernity actually roll along in the form of further and further differentiations? (..) Are there not concrete And experiments underway everywhere, in which the ‘binary codes’, thought to be strictly separated (..) are being applied to one another, combined and fused?69 In an even more fundamental critique of modernisation theory, Bruno Latour argues that We Have Never Been Modern in the first place, as the world has always consisted of ‘hybrids’: networks that bind together heterogeneous elements from supposedly autonomous spheres 70 _{Either way, in our emerging reality boundaries are} transgressed. Old binaries – true/false; good/bad; beautiful/ugly; profitable/useless – might live on, but they are not exclusively bound to specific social fields.

Speaking about the art field, Isabelle Graw notices that this dedifferentiation “implies a structural alignment of the art world to other social systems.”71 While some enthusiastically embrace this transformation or ‘realistically’ accept it, others critically warn for the negative consequences for art and its social role. Authors like Sven Lutticken and Pascal Gielen acknowledge that it becomes ever harder to classify ‘hybrids’ existing in a reality after binaries, but they also lament the resulting demise

69_{Beck, Reinvention of Politics, 27.}

70_{Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).} 71_{Graw, High Price, 145.}

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of art’s autonomy.72_{Gielen, for instance, argues that the existence of autonomous} domains was supportive of a social role of art:

To understand the world as consisting of various domains that have their own value regimes not only opens up the possibility of critique: it offers us the chance to move from one world to another, making it possible for us to continuously observe, appreciate and evaluate events and our own actions, from different perspectives. (..) The push to be more entrepreneurial and to embrace the creative industry is supposed to convince us that only one world matters. Such a reduction leads to a shrinking of the imaginative horizon and, at the same time, to the evaporation of the modern hope for autonomy.73

Likewise, Peter Marcuse for instance argues that

[c]ulture (..) is promoted as a contributor to economic development, as fostering the growth of an economically productive creative class. In the process, its critical and transcendent potential has been eviscerated. While such instrumentalization may help artists in the short run, it also poses a danger to the ultimate social role of the arts.74

Like Marcuse, Gielen is concerned that in a new reality of heterogeneous networks, art will lose its social role, as it becomes commodity, lifestyle or instrument. If art is everything, maybe it’s nothing? Dissolved in heterogeneous networks it abides to requirements from elsewhere. Such criticism is relatively common in Western art fields, where autonomous art institutions were once firmly rooted, but it is more rare in former peripheries that often do not have a tradition of independent institutions. Here, the idea that art can and should play a social role is often not institutionalised, and the effects of expediency, neoliberalism and market might be felt more dramatically as a result.

Despite these concerns about the social role of art in an increasingly dedifferentiated world, maybe we do not need to hang on to the old institutional forms of autonomous fields to safeguard this role. Ulrich Beck, for instance, wonders if it isn’t possible to organise ‘system harmonisation’ that allows for autonomy and coordination. 75_{In a discussion of new museum settings, Hall Foster argues against a} dystopian ‘either-or’ that sees the demise of critical art through entertainment, arguing instead that we have to look for productive ways to combine both functions: “if designed and programmed intelligently, museums can allow for both entertainment

72_{Pascal Gielen, “Autonomy via Heteronomy,” Open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public}

Domain, October 1, 2013, accessed January 31, 2016, http://onlineopen.org/autonomy-via-heteronomy.

73_Ibid.

74_{Peter Marcuse, “The Production of Regime Culture and Instrumentalized Art in a Globalizing State,”}

Globalizations 4, no. 1 (2007), 15.

Views on a Former Periphery: Hong Kong in the Contemporary Art World