Confounding Decolonizing “Etiquettes” and Reusing Colonial-Era Historic Buildings for Contemporary Art in the Global East: Cases from Hong Kong and Shanghai

Abstract

The recent spate of reckoning with colonial legacies, in the social inequities perpetuated by power structures and injustices, took a global turn in the last decades as magnified by the Black Lives Matter movements. Material manifestation of these legacies, from sculptures to architecture monuments, are toppled just as these power structures are contested. Yet, despite the global reach of this reckoning, developing political economies in the Global East have largely ignored these modes of interrogation. With rapid economic growth and immense living standard rise within less than one generation, colonial legacies are not spurned but popularly regarded as the source of progress and prosperity. In Shanghai, colonial-era global linkages have been appropriated to jump-start economic liberalization in the 1990s after decades of closed planned economy. Historic buildings such as those on the Bund have come to symbolize both the colonial era prosperity and their revival through their contemporary reuse. In Hong Kong, where the end of colonialism in 1997 did not result in independence, colonial-era constructions are not only regarded for their rarity in a prevalently demolition-driven urbanism, but have come to be embraced, representing amongst other things rule-of-law. This paper will unpack two specific architectural cases that reuse colonial-era buildings for contemporary visual art to show the drivers, actors, processes that confound the prevalent decolonizing ‘etiquettes.’ The former Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, which has been converted into a arts and heritage hub known as Tai Kwun, and the redevelopment of the block around the former Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai, which has been converted into the Rockbund Art Museum, are the two zoom-ins used to dissect and clarify the nuances embedded, notably in their contemporary reuse for contemporary art, as hubs of global flows’ recirculation.