Advertisement
Hong Kong
OpinionComment
Enid Tsui
Enid Tsui

Opinion | To be an arts and cultural centre, Hong Kong must first make clear censorship ‘red lines’

  • The increasingly random nature of the works being banned out of national security law considerations hurts Hong Kong’s reputation as an open society
  • Considering the creative exodus and distrust of the security law, there is urgent need for government reassurance through words and deeds

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
6
A view of the Hong Kong Film Award statue along the Avenue of Stars in 2021. Hong Kong’s much-vaunted future as a “centre for international cultural exchange” has been thrown into doubt, amid uncertainty around the “red line” regarding what can or cannot be shown in the city. Photo: Felix Wong
Enid Tsui

It may be unseasonably warm here in Hong Kong for November but the chill is settling in within the cultural sphere. As the bodies (of work) pile up under the censor’s knife – and those are just the ones we know about – the increasingly random nature of what is banned is throwing Hong Kong’s much-vaunted future as a “centre for international cultural exchange”, as envisioned in the national 14th five-year plan, into doubt.

Advertisement
Well before the 2020 introduction of the national security law, presenters of artworks in Hong Kong had been accused of political self-censorship.

Back in 1992, a sculpture commissioned by the Cartier Foundation was unveiled outside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre under the name The Flying Frenchman. Rumours circulated that the Urban Council had asked the French artist César Baldaccini to drop the original name of Freedom Fighter and its direct reference to the Tiananmen crackdown.

Then, in 2015, Otto Li Tin-lun said his 3D-printed busts of political leaders in Greater China were excluded from an exhibition at the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong, while Sampson Wong Yu-hin and Jason Lam Chi-fai said their light installation Countdown Machine was removed from the facade of the International Commerce Centre in 2016. In both cases, the presenters of the works denied they acted on political grounds.
After 1997, Hong Kong retained the colonial-era approach to censorship – the Film Censorship Authority and the Obscene Articles Tribunal would ban or restrict public access to sex and gore (notoriously, the latter decided in 1995 that Elizabeth Frink’s nude male sculpture in an office building lobby needed a fig leaf). They were not gauges of political sensitivity.
Advertisement
Under that system, the two artworks that prompted speculation of self-censorship in 2015 and 2016 couldn’t have been banned officially. But questions remained about self-censorship despite the presenters’ denial, partly because the works were overtly political. Countdown Machine, for example, was a countdown to 2047, when Beijing’s guarantee of 50 years of no change in Hong Kong technically runs out. And Li’s work symbolised the different degrees of democracy in the region.
Advertisement