A museum of hybridity: The history of the display of art in the public museum of Hong Kong, and its implications for cultural identities

Recent studies have succeeded in showing how cultural ties in museums get drawn between aesthetics, memory and political identity. They have also demonstrated how and why artistic displays can affect the political identities of individuals and of groups, through political discourses of self-recognition and self-activity [Luke 2002: 1]. One of the conclusions is that museum curators are normative agents and that museum exhibitions can become culture-writing formations, using their acts and artifacts to create conventional understandings. The display of arts in museums operates as power-plays in the sense that seeing art objects and encountering interpretations of history can alter people’s attitudes to certain political values [ibid.: 2]. This article shares the spirit of the following recent studies: that “by associating certain visual images, symbolic codes, or iconic signs together as a cohesive system of meaningful imagining, art shows create symbolic pictorial resources for depicting contemporary social individuality and political community” [ibid.: 14]. I will demonstrate the ways in which the official Museum of Art in Hong Kong influences identity formation by utilizing its resources and representative positions in both colonial and postcolonial spaces. I will argue that there are ever-changing “internal” competitions of cultural identities, and that the official museum has played a significant role in some of the cultural and political changes. Through a historical survey and investigation of some of the official and eventual displays of art, I will show how the museum incorporates the concept of cultural identity, challenges its stability and reformulates its meaning and content. I will also argue for an alternative form of cultural policy, by tracing the birth and the evolution of the local public art museum as an institution.