Artist Statement for 'Mao to Now' exhibition

A local community, or kaifong, is a work of art created from a web of stories. We belong to our community and belong to our community's stories. We create community stories, community stories create us.

In 2004, a close-knit community of residents and shop keepers in Sham Shui Po learned that their block was targeted for demolition and high-end redevelopment by the Urban Renewal Authority.
Sham Shui Po is an old district of Kowloon in Hong Kong, a shopping area famous for fabrics, electronics and repair shops. Residents and shopkeepers were given the options of taking public housing in different districts of Hong Kong, of leaving with compensation, or for some, leaving with no compensation. The residents found it difficult to communicate to the government departments that what they wanted was to preserve their community: the neighbours they had lived and worked with all their lives. Many government officials assumed, and reported to the media, that the residents were being difficult in order to bargain for more money.

The neighbourhood kaifong began a series of creative actions to share with the rest of Hong Kong what they value about their lives. This work is a website that documents these actions. It brings together many people's work in translating, glossing, documenting and responding to an extraordinary, generous, authentic and humorous series of grass-roots art actions. There have been guided tours of the rooftops, an exhibition of stories in comic-book style and an anti-hunger-strike (twenty-four days of dinner party). The kai fong's sharply funny series of eight primary-school style 'Worksheets for Government Self-Study and Improvement' was published in the highly-regarded Chinese newspaper, Ming Pao.

This kaifong's actions contribute to the next district targeted by the Urban Renewal Authority in the same way that protest groups from previous redevelopment areas, like the Star Ferry and Wedding Card Street, have contributed to theirs. One day, Hong Kong government policy will reflect the values and the strengths of the people it represents.

As this exhibition goes up in Sydney, the Sham Shui Po block is coming down in Hong Kong.