摘要
This presentation introduces the exhibition Hong Kong Reincarnated—New Lo Ting Archaeological Find, which was held at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1998. Curated by Hong Kong-based curator Oscar Ho Hing Kay, this exhibition was part of an exhibition series that explored art’s role in and artists’ responses to the Hong Kong’s 1997 Handover to China. New Lo Ting Archaeological Find staged a mythical origin story of people in Hong Kong, postulating that they were descendants of an extinct tribe of half-man, half-fish mermaids called Lo Ting. The exhibition transformed the Hong Kong Arts Centre was transformed into an archaeological site, where artists became not only “archaeologists”, but also makers of objects that were being “excavated”. Scholars and experts, some imagined, some real, contributed to the exhibition’s publication and a vibrant surrounding discourse that questioned Lo Ting’s truthfulness.
As an exhibition, New Lo Ting Archaeological Find has captivated the imagination of practitioners in Hong Kong since 1998, and are regularly invoked, discussed and re-appropriated. This presentation tells the story of New Lo Ting Archaeological Find with reference to sources and accounts dispersed in oral histories, personal and institutional archives. It explores how the exhibition’s mythic currency opens up different imaginations and conversations within contemporary practices. It also considers how research on exhibition histories, which sometimes rely more on speculative or subjective accounts from individuals rather than primary archival records, blurs the boundary between art history and curatorial research.
講者
Dr Michelle Wun Ting Wong
Michelle Wun Ting Wong received her PhD in art history from The University of Hong Kong, where she studied the emergence of cultural modernity and artistic modernism in post-WWII Hong Kong. Her current research focuses on how the travels of artists of Chinese descent in mid-twentieth century East and Southeast Asia mediated their projections of a cultural China. This research will be published as part of the six-volume anthology series A Cultural History of Asian Art (Bloomsbury). Her writing has also appeared in A Cultural History of Asian Art , the journals A Cultural History of Asian Art . Wong was previously lead researcher at Asia Art Archive, where she oversaw the accession of the Ha Bik Chuen Archive. She is an active curator, and recent curatorial projects include A Cultural History of Asian Art at Para Site (2025). She is currently lecturer at HKU in the department of Art History, and organizes the Being Human Festival 2026 for HKU Faculty of the Arts.
