Reciprocity Against Coercion: For a Reparative Mode of Writing about Art Criticism in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, where coercion and censorship are further complicated by context specific issues of coloniality, ideology and economy, art criticism has historically been practiced as an expanded field beyond writing and judgement. From the activities of Hong Kong ink art groups in the 1960s and the video letters of Videotage in the 1980s, to the exercises in listening of soundpocket since 2008 and the unbounded residencies of Speculative Place since 2018, the focus has been on relational organization and recognition of mutual interdependence.

Writer-curator Yang Yeung, founder of soundpocket, has written that caring for art demands care not only from those who are conventionally assigned to take care of art (like curators and writers) but for those who are taking care: in other words, it demands reciprocity. Art criticism is reciprocal care in which—as poet, writer and cultural critic Tang Siu Wa asserts—the focus is “shaping and articulating a public, civic society.”

Laments about the crisis of art criticism universalize it; however, the “lack of art criticism” identified with this crisis is not the same everywhere nor is the nature of the crisis itself. In fact, in some instances, what may be lacking is less art criticism than the lack of an analytical framework to make art criticism as it is being practiced, present. Through Hong Kong, it is possible to propose a framework for the study of art of the present to think art criticism differently than how art history has.

In a 2018 lecture, critic Aruna D’Souza outlined the basic tenets for a “reparative mode of art criticism”: “1) foregrounding other voices rather than analysis; 2) thinking about protest as the only position allowed to those locked out; 3) not embracing unquestioned liberal values such as free speech and artistic freedom without recognizing they are not universals; 4) and finally, naming names and be willing to suffer for it.” “All of this adds up to something that” D’Souza says, “doesn’t look much like art criticism.” In other words, the reparative mode of art criticism risks not being seen as art criticism.

This presentation titled Reciprocity against Coercion looks briefly at what thinking art criticism in Hong Kong through D’Souza’s profile of art criticism’s reparative mode and Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics, reveals about its practice in the city. When art is grounded in ecological terms—in reciprocity and mutuality, rather than competition—what is operative as art criticism changes.