Hong Kong Art Today

The Museum and Art Gallery was housed in the High Block of the newly built Hong Kong City Hall, a modernist building by the waterfront of Central, Hong Kong. This new museum had a clear-cut policy to promote and recognise "Hong Kong art"—not Chinese, British, or other Western art.[3] As a prominent event in the series of inaugural programmes for the new premises, Hong Kong Art Today was a manifestation of this mission. It was the first exhibition with Hong Kong art as its theme.[4]

Though it was an exhibition mounted in a museum setting, the artworks were for sale, with prices marked in the catalogue. The Museum and Art Gallery acquired some of the works which formed the foundation of its Hong Kong art collection.

The open call was successful in generating immense interest from the local art scene, however, it was for this reason that the exhibition soon became controversial.

Artist Luis Chan was among the many artists whose works were rejected in the open call. Chan, a watercolour painter known for his naturalistic style landscapes, had been active in the local art scene since the 1930s. He submitted several abstract works to the exhibition—a somewhat new direction of Chan's artistic endeavour. Only one of his works was accepted. As an established figure in the 1950s, and appointed an advisor to the newly established museum, his failure stirred up a storm in the local art circle, especially when Chan decided to make the rejection public to express his frustrations and address the problems of the exhibition. He wrote a long article titled "My Unsuccessful Submission to the City Hall Art Exhibition" (Chinese: 大會堂畫展落選記), which was published in serial form in the local Chinese newspaper Wah Kiu Yat Po over a period of time.[1][5]

The issues surrounding the debate included: works by famous artists of the time failing to be accepted through the open call; many rejected artists coming from the same art club (the Contemporary Chinese Artists' Guild, of which Chan was chair); the obscure criteria of adjudication under the confidentiality of the selection panel; the imbalanced quantity of Chinese paintings and Western paintings being selected; and the selections leaning towards abstract art.

The exhibition reflected how naturalism in art had become passé and that abstract art was favoured. In his 2001 article examining the incident and its consequences, Jack Lee, then studying for his PhD in art history, argued that, "[Warner's] prejudice for modern and abstract art influenced directly the museum's later exhibitions and its collection policies, which in turn caused some artists to turn to abstract art in the hope that their works would become appealing to the museum. Their conversion in due course formed a new tendency in Hong Kong art."[1]

On a personal level, Luis Chan's rejection was a "career catastrophe" as described by art historian David Clarke, who observed that, "for a great part of the 1960s [Chan's] work evidences his loss of artistic security."[6] Chan's trials in abstraction came across as a failure, and his next artistic breakthrough did not come until a decade later.

65 Artists participated in the exhibition. It included:

• Visual art of Hong Kong
• Culture of Hong Kong