When I asked Claire and Yvonne where I could go in Hong Kong to see art they turned to each other, nodded in silent agreement and recommended PMQ.
PMQ stands for Police Married Quarters. The acronym describes a collection of buildings originally built to provide housing for Chinese policemen in Hong Kong. At the time, housing already existed in the city for officers brought in from other countries, but the Hollywood Police Married Headquarters represented a new resource specifically for Chinese police officers.
The buildings now house a hybrid historical center/artistic hub/teaching space/shopping mall. Local artists/craftsmen/small businesses display, explain, and sell their creations/products.
This space was earmarked for conservation and hybridization by the Antiquities and Monuments Office of the Hong Kong government. It is meant to encourage engagement with the ‘creative industry’ and to conserve history and heritage. It seeks to contain and oversee the dissemination of art, a tool against/ a cog in the capitalist/consumerist/commodification machine. It seeks to do this in order to preserve history, culture, and heritage, building up, literally, from colonialism on the grounds of the first colonial government primary and secondary school in British-occupied Hong Kong. It is a fascinating, dynamic hybrid of expression, exploration, control, rebellion, conformity, creation, and commodification. It recounts history and seeks to move with the flow of time through participation in current creation and exchange of ideas and projects.
In an area where space is so precious, on a site with so much historical and cultural value, who is given space, time, and permission to create? Who is deemed worthy of adding to the many-layered collage of the culture of this place? Craftsmen, painters, sculptors, and designers, each occupying neat spaces made for accesible, confortable interaction with and participation in the use/ creation of art/products.
Outside, amidst the many steep staircases jutting their way through high-walled alleys, bold expressions of emotion, ideas, and beliefs shout themselves from bricks and concrete, the bark of living trees. Art peels from surfaces as water-heavy fliers, gleams defiantly in sticker form with words of encouragement, allusion to street art elsewhere, calls for collective contribution to grassroots campaigns. Messy, overlapping, interacting, and gloriously discomforting, I found art in Hong Kong.