Subsequently, we were invited to curate another exhibition – the inaugural cultural event of Gay Games Hong Kong 2024. This occasion we included 23 artists: 11 cisgender males, 11 cisgender females, and 1 transgender artist. We immersed in the history of Stonewall and the ethos of “personal best” in competitive sportsmanship. For the promotional campaign, we employed the typeface “Marsha,” inspired by the fading vertical sign of Stonewall in its prime time and named after Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender activist of the Stonewall uprising in 1969. We sought to dismantle curatorial tyranny by inviting artists to contribute a personal work of their choice, exemplifying the concept and practice of “personal best.” We collaborated with the Hong Kong AIDS Foundation and exhibited four AIDS memorial quilts, lovingly crafted by families and friends of those lost to the disease in Hong Kong between the 1990s and 2000s. LOVE+ launched in November 2023 at the Hong Kong Art Centre, when Hong Kong was still experiencing social distancing and city lockdowns. However, I felt a growing sense of connection with the people that I care for: queer artists, queer and queer-friendly art administrators, and audiences from different walks of life. We had a strong intention to create a safer environment in which queer artists could exhibit their personal works, and for an audience of interest to experience them.

In the current sociopolitical climate, global politics and international relations are experiencing unprecedented turbulence. Conservatism and far-right political ideology, agenda, and practice are sweeping aside and dismissing left-wing and progressive practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Wokeism and anti-wokeism sentiments are boiling. Representational democracy is being manipulated by deep state agents, leading to the breakdown of political-economic, and sociocultural infrastructure, rendering an undemocratic, broken, and dystopian future. The fictional description of dystopia in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is now materialized not only in my home city, Hong Kong, and across Asia, but also resurfaces in cultural criticism, political commentary, and everyday discourse in the global context. Ordinary people like you and me are rendered speechless and hopeless by the rapid changes, whereby even the mention of progressive value and vocabulary is sometimes suppressed. You might wonder whether arts even ought not to be. We artists are supposed to be free-spirited, soulful beings, and autonomous, albeit we constantly combat financial insecurity, again, and identity crises.

Contemporary arts have transformed and deviated from, dare I say, the notion of “art for art’s sake.” It is naïve to reject the multiplicities of practices of contemporary arts: making, education, institution, infrastructure, economy, ideology, etc. Therefore, I would like to focus on the voices and experiences reflected from my own circumstances. I hear about artists struggling, a common occurrence. I hear of artists being mistreated, bullied, misunderstood, and betrayed, that such conditions artistic impede practice and stymie artist careers. Contemporary arts are highly institutionalized and dictated by tastes of pseudo-collectors, star curators, ever-changing trends, volatile markets, public funding driven by political agendas, if not propaganda, all involved and influenced by the overinflated economy, by and large. Artists are often expected to churn out works and exhibitions in an assembly-line fashion. What I know, I believe, is merely the tip of the iceberg.

These crises are absolutely pressing and worrisome. Where is the role of trust, care, and love in these fragile human relationships, and in relation to the arts in our time? If I may, I want to return and retreat to the fundamentals: to curate, to love and to care.

Manchester, via London, Winter 2024. En route to the first curatorial assembly of the Asia Triennial Manchester 6, I knew it would be a long train journey. Storm Bert had disrupted most public transportation in the UK. I quickly grabbed a book from Gay’s The Word, my favourite independent and the longest serving LGBT bookstore on Marchmont Street. Dean Spade, in his work Mutual Aid: Building solidarity during this crisis (and the next) (2020), defines and advocates:

mutual aid is a collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse. (2020:7)

Without a doubt, the act of care is essential in thinking and doing mutual aid. Mutuality guides how I would like to move forward the LOVE initiative for Asia Triennial Manchester 6. Concomitantly, the last edition of ATM in 2021 was titled Love Thy Neighbour; to discuss and curate LOVE through the canon of Transvaluation feels like a natural progression.