Tale of three cities

Hong Kong heritage

The exhibition highlights Hong Kong's role as a key player on the ancient Maritime Silk Road — alongside the more obvious port cities Guangzhou and Macao, both of which served as major ports of entry for merchant vessels heading to the Chinese mainland via a river network. The show confirms that Hong Kong has always played its part in maritime trade, both as a port of transit as well as a ceramic manufacturing hub. From Penny's Bay to Lamma Island, the soil of Hong Kong seems to be a never-ending subterranean reserve of ancient ceramic.

The Sacred Hill site in Kowloon City has yielded the largest haul of archeological relics, mostly by-products of the ongoing Kai Tak Development program. "In recent years, we have discovered 900,000 pieces of ceramics, as well as remnants of houses from which we get an idea of people's livelihoods," Lee says. "Ceramic manufacturing has always been part of the city's culture," she continues. "For example, a lot of ceramic products were made, mainly for export, at the Wun Yiu Kiln Site in Tai Po in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties," She adds that in fact Hong Kong's ceramics-making history goes much further back, well into the Tang (618-907) and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907-960) periods.

Ceramic is the preferred medium of a number of contemporary Hong Kong artists, including internationally recognized stalwarts such as Rosanna Li and Fiona Wong. Their choice of medium is perhaps owed to centuries of collective memory. For her reimagined ceramic versions of ceremonial clothes worn by Chinese officials in the Han dynasties (206 BC-AD 24, 25-220) and Song Dynasty, Wong manipulates glazed porcelain as if it were putty in her hands and with a robust confidence that might have something to do with her Hong Kong heritage.