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 momentarily dislocating us from the here and now, Chung and Tanaka’s provisional manifestations offer poignant insights on how we might be able to act with collective awareness as humans in this tumultuous present.

OPENING PROGRAM 

November 4 (Sat)
2.30pm to 6pm
A Collective Present
Exhibition opening

2.30pm to 3.30pm
Artist talk with Tiffany Chung and Koki Tanaka, moderated by Mimi Brown and Christina Li

5pm to 5.30pm
Musical performance by anarchs-musician Lenny Kwok
(Seats are limited, and will be granted on a first come first served basis.)

November 5 (Sun)
11am to 1pm*
Roundtable discussion “permanent in-transit”
Participants: Mark Daly, Son Hoang, Gladys Li, Hong Duc Nguyen, Que Nguyen, and Carol Tong Thi Xuan

Moderator: Tiffany Chung

This discussion featuring human rights lawyers and Vietnamese refugees will revisit the refugees’ experience of spending their youth in Hong Kong’s detention centers during the post-1975 Vietnamese refugee crisis. We will unpack various asylum policies that emerged at the time, and discuss how a team of human rights lawyers led by Pam Baker helped them gain refugee status prior to the closure of the last Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong in 2000. The lawyers will also discuss their efforts that led to the historic introduction of the Unified Screening Mechanism by the Hong Kong government in 2014.

*RSVP: Seats are limited, please email your registration to rsvp@springworkshop.org