Michael Leung

This text is in response to an invitation from Asia Art Archive (AAA) to show a collection of printed matter and memorabilia in one of three display boxes located in the AAA library. The invitation came in the form of a game called Just in Case—succinctly named owing to the display’s form, but the name is also a reminder to bring new works to the library in the advent of misplaced and even damaged hard drives. Archives and remembering are important. They inform us of our histories, how we perceive our surroundings and whisper to us which places remain hostile. They also reveal care, hospitality and safety (in the presence of others).

After eight years of part-time teaching, I would like to explore the potential for finding and building new sites for emancipatory learning in Hong Kong. This reflective text gathers my pedagogical experiences and explores a few questions: Does part-time teaching catalyse alternative pedagogical potential or stagnate it? Does full-time teaching limit contact with the everyday and the ability to connect with other terrans (people, animals, biodiversity, bacteria, etc.)? Can pedagogy as solidarity be effective, and what visibility and longevity does it have? These reflections are part of a process, relying on mutual exchanges between students, community, and faculty members; and serves as an invitation to others to reflect on their own pedagogical experiences and share them in the public domain–contributing notes and ideas that may influence future education.

Shared at The 9th East Asian Regional Conference in Alternative Geography:
Rethinking Socio-Political Issues from East Asian Perspectives
10-13 December 2018, Daegu University, South Korea
Panel: Gender and Spatial Justice II: Struggles over Representation and Uneven Development

On Monday 4th February 2019 I arrived at Mondeggi Bene Comune, a 200-hectare farmland with several farmhouses that have been squatted for over four years in Florence. I learnt about this farming collective through a serendipitous encounter with an Italian M. at Mapopo Community Farm in Hong Kong in June 2016. Three years later I ascended Via Mondeggi and passed by the helicopter pad and the grandiose Villa Mondeggi, both on my right. Walking between two squatted farmhouses I was then welcomed by a friend that I met at the ZAD (Zone à Défendre, Zone to Defend) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes last year, and the organisers of the Reclaim the Fields European Assembly 2019.

Shared at The 16th Asia Pacific Conference: Regenerating Localities in a Global World, 1-2 December 2018
Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan
Panel: “Do it Together”: Autonomous Activisms in East Asia with Ming Lin, Motonao Mori and Damian Cheng

The most crucial contradictions of capitalism are not those within the system but between the system and the natural world.
– Murray Bookchin

Insurrectionary Agricultural Milieux are rhizomatic forms of agriculture that exist in local response to global conditions of biopolitics and neoliberalism. Government-supported development projects on agricultural land have compelled farmers and supporters to turn to direct action in resistance to land commodification and the excavation of its resources. As in the cases of Grow Heathrow (London), Mondeggi Bene Comune (Florence) and Ma Shi Po Village (Hong Kong), these indefinite sites of resistance become heterotopias that gather people from multidisciplinary backgrounds and different communities.

In these instances, participation creates an insurrectionary experience – a self-transforming project towards full autonomy, or what Max Stirner referred to as ‘ownness’. Stirner mentioned that ‘insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves’. This can radicalise and politicise individuals in unpredictable ways, including empowering them with skills in self-sufficient farming.

The Diggers (1964), Agrarian Socialism and the Guerrilla Gardening movement (made popular by Richard Reynolds) served as the fertile top soil in a pre-Occupy milieu. During Occupy (from 2011), insurrectionary agricultural projects were widespread, from the planters in Zuccotti Park (Occupy Wall Street) to Farms for Democracy in Hong Kong – an agricultural platform that existed in three of four occupations sites (2014–2015). Insurrectionary Agricultural Milieux can also be seen in refugee camps across Europe and in Chiapas by the revolutionary Zapatistas.

Local resistances such as this year’s occupation in Ma Shi Po Village have a tendency to stay local and untranslated, and even unreported by mainstream media. When comparing emancipatory strategies on a global platform, such local resistances and their communities can meet, share tactics and learn from one another. For example, designing fortresses and blockades as architectural structures, anonymity in the form of humourous masks of oligarchs, befriending structural forces so that they are less violent during evictions, and even introducing friendly Green Giant-like mascots such as Spinach Man (overleaf photo) can all play a role in supporting agriculture in today’s world.

Presentation for Ecologies. Matters of Coexistence: Space Under Pressure

(Voluntary) Labour of Love introduces work as prefigurative politics – facing the chimera of capitalism, hegemony and collusion. The short lecture will discuss how Hong Kong’s socio-political and environmental conditions can become catalysts towards ecological heterotopias and a more equitable society.

Details:

Presented on 12th September 2017 at 7pm, Connecting Space, Hong Kong
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/413713619030648/?active_tab=about

Presentation for Public Lectures: Curating and Social Change

Since moving to Hong Kong in 2009, Michael Leung has been focusing on food safety, local farming issues and urban agriculture. Like in many places around the world, Hong Kong’s sociopolitical terrain allows privatisation, developer hegemony and neoliberal capitalism to thrive relentlessly – in its process rezoning valuable agricultural land and eroding communities. The presentation will share creative strategies that encourage participation, self-reflection and social change in reactivating our ecological commons – environmental heterotopias formed by insurrectionary experiences, a total view and empowered communities. Towards an Ecological Commons will also illustrate relations between non-profit art spaces, guerrilla farms, art zines and civil disobedience.

Details

Presented on 28th March 2017 at 7pm, Connecting Space, Hong Kong
www.connectingspaces.ch/public-lectures-curating-for-social-change
Facebook event: www.facebook.com/events/166218500530185

This chapter reflects on entanglements within the ongoing Wang Chau Village resistance in the New Territories region of Hong Kong. It is an attempt to engage in what art theorist Gerald Raunig refers to as "wild and transversal writing"—an untamed approach to writing that connects people from different disciplines, and subsequently builds new social bonds and lines of solidarity through its readers (Raunig 2013, 35). Exemplifying the cross-disciplinary approach of its writing, this text problematizes the legacy of British colonial government policies that continue to discriminate and dispossess villagers today; describes a praxis of coorganizing four Jackfruit Festivals with Wang Chau villagers (from 2017 to 2020); and shares a "pedagogy of the movement" within Hong Kong's land struggles/resistances. Unreconciled thoughts are weaved into this essay in the form of italicized text, prompting further research paths. This is followed by a postscript that includes updates and new lines of solidarity, which acknowledge that chapters written within social movements are time stamped but never static, and always inviting.

In Hong Kong, a city populated with over seven million people and with a sunset lost to towering buildings, it can be difficult to imagine such a city becoming reacquainted with nature again. Fortunately, a short roller coaster minibus ride can take you to the countryside, coastal villages and to ports with boats connecting to outlying islands. But for those who are based and rooted in the urban environment, where can encounters with nature happen on a daily basis?

Michael Leung, Solidarity Street (Hong Kong: Black Book Press, 2017), 135.

Thesis Novel: Composting with Academia expands on an essay written for the last remaining credited course of my PhD, and elaborates on an exhibit from 2021 where texts relating to Art, Farming and Land in the Global Neoliberal Era were placed on a foldable table. The thesis novel places the reader in tension and dialogue, with the many characters and worlds by the author. I argue that the thesis novel is a counter-form of the conventional thesis which Susan Suleiman argues has a ‘simplifying and schematizing tendency’. The counter acknowledges the complexity of the world(s) that the thesis author is situated in—violent and oppressive, flourishing and hopeful, wild and transversal, etc. The counter-form does not exist in a vacuum or in the academic vault, with its inaccessible campuses and libraries, digital paywalls, and neoliberal agendas that are competitive, capitalistic and colonial (in an extractive, profit-driven and geographically expansive sense). The counter-form acknowledges that research is always done with others (co-produced, sometimes with other species), centering their perspectives and stories, with the thesis writer “simply” weaving everything together, and then giving the research back to the community. For example, in the form of bilingual and self-published printed matter, freely distributed to community members.