Shifting Topography
Chang Tsong-zung

In a city where real estate prices dominate all social discourse, and acquiring private space is the principal goal of every person reporting to work, there is a constant obsession about the potential value of every square inch, and fantasies about myriad possible uses. How this value system works, and how it gets fetishised, are central to understanding our economy. Exploring the possible uses of space, from the public to the secret and clandestine, opens an undercover entry into the cultural heart of Hong Kong. It is here where Hong Kong’s core value lies.

The mapping of the stock index, the pattern of street-grids encasing childhood memories, and the floor plans of malls tracing commodity-desire – all have become rooted in the Hong Kong imagination. They are blueprints for making sense of our world. Here the old science of geomancy has also been brought up to date for mapping positions of energy in simple offices, so as to plan positions of defense and channel paths of good will. We do not need to climb Lion Rock or ride on the Peak Tram to see how the spirit of the ‘feng-shui’ dragon is re-materializing in this city.

At home, our imagination is compartmentalized by boxed-in spaces. Almost invariably these are artificial ‘places’ without stories (histories), identifiable only as numbers; standardized ‘units’ removed from the ground. They need fiction to maintain their value: hence the embarrassing hyper-fictions of European highlife in Hong Kong real estate advertising. This helps to explain the strong urge among many Hong Kong artists to discover ‘true’ stories, to take back imaginative possession of their city. Some adopt the strategy of navigation by delineating tours and paths; some claim visual possession by fixing landmarks and making imaginary maps. There is no escape from the passion to escape from the monotony of repetitiveness and loss of memory to which we are being condemned by capitalist logic.

Artists in this exhibition have developed tactics and working methods that may be used to illuminate and transform the daily routine of urban life, but these represent only a small reserve of the countless ways to access the city. It is up to each one of us living here to discover for himself the hidden pattern of the matrix: the intrigues, the desires, the secret passages and links. By bringing a true imagination to bear, we can identify the wells of untapped energy and the possibilities for constructing a character from the materials of characterless structures, in order to build stories and topographs that will eventually become history, and a citizen’s topology of the city.