Stories of Hong Kong Artists—Interview Manuscripts from 1998 (traditional Chinese edition)

What was the art world like in Hong Kong before the arrival of the art fairs and M+?

These 26 artist interviews, quietly preserved on a hard drive for two decades, record not only the individual development of the featured artists but also the collective anxiety around the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, thoughts on the Tiananmen Incident, migration, the overseas pursuit of art, the everyday struggle to be an artist in an extreme pragmatic society, and all sorts of dilemmas that are unimaginable in the booming art scene of today.

Unpretentiously written by Hong Kong artist Leung Chi Wo in 1998, the book is also an account of a young artist searching for the meaning of being an artist, and is perhaps a prequel to Leung’s 2012 video installation Untitled (Words about Memory but Not Exactly) about fragments of local art history.