INFO
| Name | Fusion — Hong Kong Auckland Artist Exchange, 交溶點 |
| Year | 1996 |
| Names of Artists | Yuk Keung Kurt Chan 陳育強, Denise Kum, Luise Fong, Poshan Anthony Leung 梁寶山, Shunkit Wong 王純杰, Yuk King Tan 陳玉瓊 |
| Curator | Richard Dale, Oscar Ho |
| Artform | Visual arts |
| City | Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Hong Kong |
ABOUT
In 1996, Aotearoa curator Richard Dale and Hong Kong artist and curator Oscar Ho organised an artistic exchange between three contemporary artists from Aotearoa and three contemporary artists from Hong Kong. The exchange produced two exhibitions: TransFusion at the Pao Galleries at Hong Kong Arts Centre (28 June–9 July 1996) and Fusion at Auckland Art Gallery’s New Gallery (18 October–8 December 1996).
In the project’s accompanying publication, Dale describes how the project was conceived:
The exchange began when I contacted Oscar at the end of 1995 and it started proper with our arrival in Hong Kong in June 1996 for the first stage. Yuk King Tan, Denise Kum and I arrived a week before Luise Fong. [...] The outcome of this exploration, which counted as research for Tan and Kum, was two installations — sprung from their intensely personal experiences of the city — included in the first exhibition of the exchange called TransFusion held three weeks later at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.
Dale went on to contextualise the project within “a time of uncertainty given Hong Kong’s new status within the People’s Republic”. Ho’s essay for the publication also situates delicate questions of identity and ‘Chineseness’ within this context and he was careful to state that the exhibition demonstrates a diversity of perspectives, rather than the drawing together of artists under one ‘Chinese’ identity: “As Hong Kong is now part of China, and with a strong sense of Chinese nationalism everywhere, this complexity of ‘cultural composition’ of each and every individual must be fully acknowledged.”
In the publication, Auckland Art Gallery director Chris Saines described the exhibition as “the Gallery’s first major commitment to and direct engagement with the contemporary art of the Asia region”. One of the project’s sponsors was the relatively new Asia New Zealand Foundation (then called Asia 2000), and reviewing the exhibition for monica magazine, Anna Sanderson noted the underlying context of economic interest in the Asian region: “The most brilliant fusion in this artists’ exchange between Hong Kong and New Zealand, is between left and right-wing ideas about art and politics.”
