The Hong Kong element of the show is introduced through two new paintings by the young Chinese-American artist Livien Yin, whose parents emigrated from Beijing to New York in the 1980s. She often creates imagined scenarios based on historical research as a way to resist dominant narratives about migration and colonisation.

The original shows two sedan-chair coolies standing near a Sikh police officer in Pedder Street, Hong Kong, with a clock tower, long since demolished, in the background.

Avid collector brings Hong Kong’s colonial history to life

Yin’s playful adaptation sees the Sikh officer and a Chinese woman leaning against each other on a rooftop, watching the sunset and sharing a rare moment of leisure with one of the coolies sitting nearby.

This scene highlights the racial divisions of the time: the trio are hiding away on the roof because there was a curfew for most Chinese citizens of Hong Kong in the 19th century, often enforced by a new contingent of Sikh officers brought in from Punjab, in British India, to help the white elite control the unruly masses.

The other work, called Nightstand, shows the legs and feet of a reclining woman surrounded by medicine bottles and pestle and mortars used to ground herbal pastes. This refers to a requirement that all prostitutes serving European customers had to be subjected to regular health checks.

These are shown among paintings by artists of Southeast Asian and Afro-Caribbean heritage, such as Hurvin Anderson, a second-generation British artist of Jamaican descent.

His painting, called After a Road to Rome III (2006), is a dreamlike, semi-abstract landscape based on a visit to Jamaica. According to Ossei-Mensah, there is often a strong sense of detachment in Anderson’s painted spaces, be it a neighbourhood in Birmingham, central England, where he grew up or the place where his parents were born, representative of the sense of loss and alienation common to the migrant experience.

Several of the works include elements of craft traditions that were once dismissed as backward. Jeanne Jalandoni literally weaves patterns of traditional garments in the Philippines into her canvases, and Miguel Angel Payano Jnr, an Afro-Caribbean American artist working between Beijing and New York, creates Chinese New Year sculptures featuring dark-skinned infants.

The other artists featured include Theaster Gates, Chris Ofili, Zao Wou-Ki and less familiar names such as Paul Anthony Smith, Adam De Boer and Delphine Desane.

The exhibition’s range is both a strength and a weakness; it risks flattening the differences between each colonial venture (as detailed in the 2011 book Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, from which the show takes its title). The absence of any Hong Kong artist is a missed opportunity for a meaningful and timely reconsideration of what the city has in common with other former colonies.

Ossei-Mensah, who has not been able to come to Hong Kong because of the travel restrictions imposed to curb the spread of coronavirus, is upfront about his lack of familiarity with the historical contexts of some of the artworks. But he sees the exhibition as part of a cautionary tale about a constant theme in colonialism: extraction with no reciprocity.

“What if the ‘global south’ comes together, acknowledge traumas we’ve all come to deal with. We need to strategise, protect ourselves and protect our autonomy,” he says.

“Ghosts of Empires”, Ben Brown Fine Arts, 201 The Factory, 1 Yip Fat Street,
Wong Chuk Hang, Tue-Sat, 11am – 7pm. Until May 14.

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