MUSEUM
FEW PORT CITIES ARE AS DEFINED BY THEIR HARBOURS AS HONG KONG, A FACT REFLECTED IN TWO CENTURIES OF CULTURALLY HYBRID ART, WRITES CHRISTOPHER DONNOLLEY
Documenting our maritime heritage
In the mid-1970s, Hong Kong shipping executive Anthony Hardy was passing by an art gallery in New York when he noticed in the window an extraordinary painting of an all-toofamiliar scene. It was Hong Kong Harbour, which he knew well through his line of work. There were the unmistakable hills of Hong Kong Island, with its towering Peak, and even some familiar manmade monuments.
The harbour was full of ships, but none he could recognise – stately clippers, so called because of their speed under sail in the perpetual race to get valuable cargoes of tea and other luxuries to the markets of London and New York.
Hardy spent an unscheduled hour and a half in the prophetically named Incurable Collector Gallery, later to emerge “with the painting tucked under my arm, at what was the start of my slippery slide”. Although he’d been involved in the shipping industry in Hong Kong since 1961, until this time Hardy had hardly heard of a China “REMAINING RELEVANT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT TO US” — RICHARD WELSLEY, MUSEUM DIRECTOR became in the following decades one of the largest such collections in private hands, and that today constitutes much of the collection of the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, whose establishment was driven largely by Hardy himself. The China Trade genre gets its name from the era of seaborne trade between mostly Southern China and the West, which started three centuries before the founding of Hong Kong in the neighbouring Portuguese enclave of Macau. Much of the merchandise made by skilled Chinese workers would be regarded today as l]`]ry Ooods" sil^erware silSs fine porcelain Rade car^inOs and intricate furniture designed for European tastes. 1n a s]mpt]o]s 5id 4e^els o ٻ ce tPat o^erlooS tPe stately and newly renovated Tai Kwun complex, which until recent years functioned as the city’s bleak Central Central Police Station and bleak prison, the walls of Hardy’s plushly decorated room seem to groan under the weight of priceless art and deep antiquity. He explains what makes the paintings not quite East nor West through a work titled An East India Company Midshipman. ¹)t first it looSs a ?estern paintinO º says 0ardy ¹J]t certain tPinOs give it away as being painted by a Chinese hand,” he says. The lower part of the sallow face of a seafaring European is ruddy red from voyages across South China waters under the bright sun, while the upper part of the face, with the cap removed, is ghostly pale. “He’s obviously been woken out of his bunk to have his portrait painted, because the buttons in the middle of the shirt are all astray. A European painter probably would have corrected the scene, but the Chinese artist has painted what he saw.” Hardy explains that the global centres of China Trade art are London, Hong Kong and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, near Boston in the US, due to that city’s key early role in America’s gradual rise as a maritime trading power in the years after the American Revolution. It comes as no surprise learn the Maritime Museum’s collection oN tPis type oN worS is perPaps tPe finest in )sia But it was the enchanting and technically superior ceramics that became the most sought-after commodities in China’s trade with the West, catering as they did for all tastes – and for centuries. The museum’s is home to more than 300 pieces of ceramics, which date between the 18th and 20th centuries. The museum also houses some 100 model ships, which range in size from palm-sized to a large model of the Keying, built on a 1 to 12 scale. Fortunately, knowledge of the ship-modelling craft has survived. There are galleries dedicated to art and artefacts of seafaring technology – oddly shaped sextants, chronometers, barometers and other precision instruments that measured angles of the sun and stars, counted the miles of sea travel and kept perfect time on pitching seas, which still retain their beauty if not utility in the sullen era of GPS. Two truly monumental works in the museum’s collection are the Alexander Hume Painting and a giant scroll titled Pacifying the South China Sea. At 91.5 by 276.5cm, the gigantic Alexander Hume panoramic scene is painted in gouache on silk, most likely in a studio in old Canton. Made for the European market, it shows a Western naturalistic landscape style set in a traditional Chinese hand-scroll format. It’s wortP a ^isit to tPe m]se]m R]st to wonder at tPe tecPniY]e oN tPe painter’s craft, which keeps revealing itself at progressively smaller intervals. It’s believed the painting was bought as a souvenir by Alexander Hume of the East India Company in China shortly before he sailed Pome in 0]me Roined tPe company in risinO to Jecome the Chief of the Company’s Representatives in Canton. The museum is building a solid future through its clever, entertaining and informative recollections of Hong Kong’s fascinating past through expanding collections and several vast exhibitions that it hosts every year. Recent shows have included a tribute to Hong Kong’s silver trade, Hong Kong pirates, two and half centuries of Sino-American sea trade, and rare and ancient maps, to name a few. 4eadinO m]cP oN tPis e ٺ ort o^er tPe past decade is Oallery director Richard Wesley who studied, taught and practiced museum management in Australia, including on historic Norfolk Island, a one-time penal settlement that later resettled for many AngloPolynesian descendants of the Bounty 5]tiny Nrom Nar AE]nO Pitcairn Island. Wesley sees a distinct future for the museum. “Since 2013, the Hong Kong Maritime Museum has operated from Central Ferry Pier 8 on the edge of one of the world’s great commercial harbours,” he says. “As our audience and community support has grown, we’re seeSinO to tell not R]st tPe commercial Pistory oN sPippinO in 0onO Kong, but also to communicate the critical importance of conserving the amazing biodiversity found in local waters. Remaining relevant to the daily lives of local residents is vitally important to us. We’re also an important tourist asset for the city.” Libby Chan, the museum’s director of curatorial and collections, has a PhD in Chinese Art from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, worked at the Singapore Asian Heritage Museum and is a Curatorial Fellow at the the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington. I ask her what made the collection so special. “What makes it unique is its thematic and East-Meets-West contexts,” she says. “It’s not a big collection, around 5,000 items, but it’s certainly of very high quality, in particular the export Chinese Trade arts, such as paintings, ceramics and other materials. Many are world-class pieces.” The collection keeps growing, thanks to the generous starts provided by founder Hardy and his late wife Susan Chen Hardy, who was also a renowned collector and dealer. Not only does Hardy generously and continuously donate to and support the Museum, but he also has extraordinary contacts among the shipping, museum and collectors’ networks. “The many facets of the collection allow us to tell the port story of Hong Kong, and how it links to the Pearl River Delta, Southern China, Asia and the World,” says Chan. She’s certainly at home with her work: “The area of maritime heritage is broad and multi-disciplinary. It requires a creative approach that really is fun. The challenge is how to make the historical past become relevant to the present and the future.” Curators are faced with the preconception that anything connected to maritime is m]sty and old NasPioned ¹1n tPis RoJ imaOinati^e curating, fresh angles and engaging narratives are important. Indeed today, the sea is the core of human activity and our lives. Ninety percent of global trade today is still transmitted across the ocean.”