conducted June 30, 2010 in Hong Kong
CM: Please talk about the inspirations for you work?
LCW: I think being an artist in Hong Kong, I am was born in the late 1960’s and when I graduated it was the early 90’s in Hong Kong there were not a lot of opportunities for artists. I didn’t mean to be an artist, I just wanted to do something for myself. Now adays if you ask graduate students they will tell you they want to be an artist and have a bid career in a gallery but I didn’t think about that. I was very young. I got a scholarship so I went to Italy. It was only the beginning that I learned about so called artistic practice. So I returned to Hong Kong in 1992. It was a very interesting moment for me. And then I thought maybe I could be an artist. Which is kind of vague but trying to be an artist that means to try to create continuously in whatever situation. Of course, there were not many commercial galleries it was also the beginning of contemporary Chinese art being international. I remember after I came back there were really big exhibitions like Post 89 at Hanart TZ so it was an interesting moment. In HK most interesting activities were artist run or artists initiatives. Hong Kong Art Center was crucial in the 1990’s because the museums were always boring and because part of the government structure. Hong Kong Art Center would show internationally and local artists until the late 1990’s when Oscar Ho left and so it was interesting for me. I got a job at a publishing house and it was the time where I learned about local culture. I didn’t think about learning about Hong Kong history until I worked in the publishing house. It was before the Hong Kong handover and so for the publishing history there was a big need to publish works that were by Hong Kong authors or that were about Hong Kong and then I was lucky to work with fantastic colleagues and we explored interesting topics. I worked for so called mainly pictorial. We published interesting titles like the post cards of Hong Kong, mainly the popular arts that was interesting for me. That made me think about using Hong Kong as an artistic practice. It was always part of my job to visit historical sites but at the same time I learned from it and tried to make photographic works. From 1993-mid 1990’s I made a pinhole photographic series of old Hong Kong, which was very interesting for me. I really loved to add so called sites of the cities in terms of the historical context or cultural context and I think the transitions of Hong Kong back to China. Nowadays I look at it a little direct or maybe naïve but it was important but it was enlightenment for myself to learn about what is happening before you. I think developed a keen interest in art then which was 5 years after I graduated. I really loved my job but I wanted to further my practice of my studio art so I decided to do my MFA in China U. I spent two years there. Being an artist, I always had a job here. I had a great job actually but that means you wouldn’t spend as much time doing work. This is around the time I started Para/Site.
CM: Can you tell me about Para/Site?
LCW: It was artist run and we started a few months after I started my artist studies. I have a good friend named Keith Jung It was a time when there were not many artists that were not interested in photography or photo based practice and I found him really interesting and we shared a lot of things in common. There is another self-taught artist Patrick Lee, we found we could share a lot of things and wanted to initiate a project together. There weren’t many opportunities for exhibitions in Hong Kong. Hong Kong Art Center more now then at this time is a huge rental gallery. It was an opportunity that we could just to run a gallery and make a show ourselves but it was expensive and we could not afford it. We started to offer alternative. We just needed a space and that art scene was so marginal. We didn’t need to connect with all of society just our friends and colleagues so we thought we could just rent an apartment with three rooms and have installations there but it was very difficult because space and properties is very difficult in Hong Kong especially almost impossible to obtain a short lease only one or two months and then. A friend told us that the space below her apart. Was available. I saw the space before because an artist rented as an open studio so it was interesting. It was in Kennedy Park so outside main center so interesting for artistic reasons. You need more people to do more people to do bigger projects so it was minimum three four moths to do a lease so we expand our group to include four other members. We basically all had a studio. We had an idea to produce work as a workshop and finally all the works produced there were site specific and we made three exhibitions. Three weeks to produce works an three weeks to show. So we had it for four months. Then the foundation the Hong Kong Development arts council gave individual grants to each artist so then we had the opportunity to really focus on making the work so we were really lucky we got the small grant but that covered the rent. So from the very beginning we wre somehow looking at alternative possible but also right from the beginning had instructional support. It was a successful project and a lot of people cae. One more accidental find was that we attracted lots of neighbors, which we didn’t think to do this. We were in Kennedy Park because we couldn’t afford Sheung Wan. It created new possibilities, which has become the essence of Para/Site. Basically it is a site or a space or collective that would respond to the situation. We look at the neighborhood, the so-called local context. It was only for four months and we had very positive feedback from the arts community and we were very encouraged to continue.
CM: Can you tell me about how Para/Site changed over the years?
