Christopher K. Ho

Twenty-five years after the liminal moment of Hong Kong’s handover.

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Hong Kong-based artist Christopher K. Ho’s CX 889 is barely recognizable as a work of art when walking along Georgia Street in Vancouver, unless you wonder why a ramp leads nowhere or why a Bulova clock is jammed, uncannily straight, into a wall and permanently set at noon, or midnight.

Ho’s site-specific work is on view until Oct. 16 at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Offsite, located in a swanky part of downtown that’s bordered by the Living Shangri-La skyscraper and stores like Gucci and Burberry ­– venues accessible only to an upper-class demographic. This sense of exclusion is amplified by the installation’s two glowing No Entry signs as well as similar warnings around the site, including one on the rear door of Urban Fare, immediately adjacent to the work.

CX889 – named for Cathay Pacific’s flight from New York to Vancouver and Hong Kong – marks the midpoint of China’s promise to give Hong Kong relative autonomy for 50 years after its 1997 handover by Britain. A central feature of the work is a double ramp rising from a square pool of water. This shallow pool, a pre-existing feature of the site, gives the ramp the impression of an island.

Beside the ramp, a baggage trolley sits slightly askew next to an ashtray stand made from pebbled stonework. These quotidian objects are incongruous; one could think a passerby simply abandoned the cart. But there’s also something jarring about them. They offer a nostalgic grounding that contrasts with the work’s uncanny elements, such as a ramp that almost seems to float and the clock jutting from a tiled wall.

Ho, in a CBC interview, recalls that Britain formally transferred authority over Hong Kong to China a few minutes before midnight on July 1, 1997, hence the clock’s suspended hour. Ramps, he says, were a distinctive feature of the Kai Tak airport. After disembarking, “you went down these ramps, and there would be a crowd of people at the bottom of the ramp, and you would look out for your family members to reunite with them.”

One of the installation’s two glowing yellow and red signs is overlaid with a two-tone grid pattern visible only from side angles. Guest curator Godfre Leung says the checkerboard pattern was a visual tool on the side of Kowloon Tsai Hill that instructed pilots to make a 45-degree turn for the terrifying descent into Hong Kong’s former international airport, Kai Tak, which closed in 1998.

Ho, who exhibits internationally, has spent most of his adult life in the United States but was born in Hong Kong and returned there a year ago, where he is executive director of the Asia Art Archive, a non-profit that documents recent Asian art. In 2018, he re-enacted the interior seating arrangement of CX 888, the Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver and New York. It came replete with deck chairs and overhead screens that flashed the airline’s teal and maroon brand colours in dactylic hexameter, the poetic meter Homer used in his epic poem, The Odyssey, evoking the transformative dimensions of this journey over the Pacific.

Hong Kong’s imminent handover to China led to a wave of migration to Vancouver between 1989 and 1997, making Ho’s latest installation a discursive place of haunting and displacement, but also one that evokes the simultaneity and escape that airports signify for many of us. However, the work’s migratory narrative moves us beyond Vancouver as a home city. Ultimately, it touches on an eternal haunting for all those who live in diaspora: the question of return. ■

Christopher K. Ho, CX 889, at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite from June 23 to Oct. 16, 2022.

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Vancouver Art Gallery - Offsite

1100 West Georgia Street, Vancouver, British Columbia