Just over a year ago, thousands of pro-democracy protesters took over Hong Kong’s busiest thoroughfares. This month, 31 life-sized naked bodies made by Antony Gormley from cast iron and fibreglass will infiltrate the skyline, overlooking some of the same streets. The arrival of the British artist’s Event Horizon, which is due to be unveiled on 19 November (until 18 May 2016), was delayed by more than a year after a banker jumped from a high-rise building owned by the project’s original sponsor, Hongkong Land.
“The Umbrella and democracy movement is a part of Hong Kong’s wish to have an independent identifiable identity,” Gormley says. “I cannot see this project as not being connected with the changes that happened in the city. I feel solidarity with [the people who took to the streets]. I think art is an essential instrument of self-determination.”
Gormley describes Event Horizon—which explores the place of the individual in a collective space—as a catalyst but also as a symptom of a city trying to define itself separately from its colonial past and its present political control by mainland China. “I see the nature of Hong Kong as having been hidden,” he says. “What Hong Kong means and what it stands for, in a sense, has never been in evidence because of external power being exercised over the rights of the individual citizen.”
Event Horizon has been criticised in Hong Kong. “There was a sense that it was somehow distasteful to do this show using high buildings because of the prevalence of suicide by this method in Hong Kong,” Gormley says. “I have the absolute opposite view. The more this is swept under the carpet, the more people don’t face up to the pressures that are there, particularly on the middle-management market traders, the worse it will get.”
When Gormley first visited the city to search for locations in May 2013, he planned to concentrate on the Central district, but his project has now expanded to include areas associated with the Umbrella movement. One sculpture, for instance, will stand on top of the Queensway Government Offices in Admiralty, a centre of the Occupy protests, while a second figure will be planted in the Statue Square gardens, not far from where police fired tear gas at the crowds.
Hong Kong could be Event Horizon’s last stop, Gormley says. It made its debut in London in 2007 and travelled to Rotterdam, New York, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The project has prompted a range of reactions in each city. “A mixture of consternation, fear, then curiosity followed by delight has more or less been the rule,” Gormley says. In London, the project irked commuters; in New York, in the wake of 9/11, it was greeted by paranoia before gaining acceptance.
The artist believes that the delay in Hong Kong was unnecessary and that Hongkong Land withdrew its support because it feared that either its market share or its reputation would be damaged. “Markets like stability so that they can just rake their returns,” he says. “That’s been the hidden kind of obstruction to the realisation of this project—the need for complicit silence with the status quo, whether that’s Beijing or markets.”
Asked how he managed to revive Event Horizon, Gormley says individuals including the property investor Goodwin Gaw were not prepared to let it go. Adrian Cheng, the founder and chairman of the K11 Art Foundation, then came on board as lead partner, and the British Council gave the project its backing.
The co-operation of local landlords has been crucial, Gormley says. “Support having originally come from the Jockey Club and Hongkong Land—you could say groups associated with the old order—has now been supplanted by Cantonese-speaking indigenous Hong Kong entrepreneurs and landowners, who have a different attitude to the identity of their home city. I think the fact that this is happening now is an indication of a very profound change of spirit.”
In a city of auction houses, commercial galleries and art fairs, a project so accessible to the public takes on more significance. “To the degree that this is a very evident occupation of collective space, it’s a call for art to be allowed to be common again,” Gormley says.
Confirmed sites for Event Horizon include: City Gallery of City Hall; General Post Office; Hong Kong City Hall; LKF Plaza; Queensway Government Offices; the Fringe Club; St. George’s Building; St. John's Building; Statue Square Gardens (ground level) and New World Tower.