No Heritage Found on Map: The Vanishing Villages of Hong Kong

This exhibition, exhibited at the Tai Po Arts Centre in Hong Kong, served as a space for tracing and reconciling the past and acknowledging the loss of tangible and intangible cultural heritage, not only for the villagers but also for the general public. The spaces and places, once taken for granted, now held a deeper historical value, inviting a renewed appreciation for their rich and complex history.

The image-based project revealed, initially unbeknownst to me, that the research area held much more significance than simply containing a dwindling number of pre-colonial Hakka homes outside of Hong Kong’s urban New Territories. From the cultural revolution to massive infrastructure projects and many more subtle changes throughout the 1960-80s led to the slow yet steady decline of these traditional Hakka villages that had existed for 500 years. For hundreds of years, visual culture and rituals of food and dance served as expressions of community ties and cultural traditions within and between neighboring villages. These are now predominantly carried out by village elders, with the irony being that the purpose of these rituals is to bring prosperity to the next generation, who show little interest in them or village life, let alone in participation.

The design of the exhibition had each village showcased with an upscaled orthographic aerial map, a main image, clusters of smaller images, selected interview quotes, and blank A4 sheets to record memories or feedback. The centerpiece of the installation was a large map which adorned the floor of the gallery and comes from 1974, occupying a prominent position with lights placed carefully to highlight those villages from the project. Individual village displays were placed in approximate relation to follow the map from West to East and North-East.

As we explore the map we see the completion of the Sheun Wan (Plover Cove) reservoir to the East in 1973, a remarkable engineering achievement. To the West, the construction of the industrial estate and Tai Po Centre began, dramatically reshaping the landscape and impacting the villagers’ lives in both positive and negative ways. For very few villages, it brought plumbing, roads, and electricity, but for most of the villages, the dam and its catchments robbed them of the mountain’s waters relied upon for farming, and the land reclamation projects polluted the harbor once abundant in sea life. (continues below…)

“No Heritage Found on Map photographs are able to describe the transient rural environment covering multiple aspects of its disappearing traditional craft, vernacular painting, religious iconography, vernacular architecture, folk art ornamentation, and traditional cuisine with great detail. The images are highly descriptive and this fact evinces the extensive contribution of photography to social sciences.

No Heritage Found on Map explores the photographic ontology and its distinctive archival nature, a trait that has been explored by previous historical photographic works including Eugene Atget, and more contemporary works such as Marti Llorens. The research also proposes art installation as a device to create an interactive space with the public. The interactiveness, or, the participation of the public (Hakka villagers themselves) with the art installation is given by the smart solution of inviting them to write on pre-arranged blank papers available beside the group of photographs on the walls of the gallery. This strategy is used to produce valuable feedback information that approaches the practices of participative research, therefore, engaging the Hakka villagers both as subjects and producers of the artwork.” -External Reviewer