Beadman swings open the door – she has a big smile, round glasses and sounds very English – and ushers me into Hidden Space. A 300 sq ft exhibition area houses a solo show by Hong Kong artist Sami Yip, the sixth recipient of the annual Hidden Space award.
Called “Sunrise. Shift Your Weight”, the exhibition consists of a set of videos featuring a physically unimpressive man looking dejected and exhausted as he tries and fails to complete a range of tasks at home.
I was free to do anything to the space. I could have painted the floor or knocked down walls. It is very rare to have a space like this in Hong Kong.
In contrast, the same person is seen in a separate video giving an upbeat instructional video, projecting a very different persona.
“Sami is showing us different aspects of the self, the public facing and the private, and how personal anguish may be both relentless as well as hidden from view,” Beadman says.
Yip says: “I was free to do anything to the space. I could have painted the floor or knocked down walls. It is very rare to have a space like this in Hong Kong.”
A few strides across the room, through a door on the far side, and we enter another hidden space. Beadman’s personal studio is filled with books and canvases, and the work surfaces are strewn with fragments of fabric and paper.
This space is clearly a hive of creative activity.
When Beadman sank her savings into the industrial unit, she did not have a concrete plan for its use – a testament to her spontaneous nature.
There is a potted version – ‘I’m from Hong Kong, my Mum’s from mainland China, my Dad’s English’.
“Art is one of those peculiar subjects; there is no clear path. If you know what you are going to make in advance, then you are illustrating an idea and it is somehow never the most successful thing,” she says.
Before we introduce Katie Ho and Isabella Ng, the co-founders of Hidden Space, who Beadman met on her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) course, let’s first address the question Beadman often gets asked: “Where are you from?”
“There is a potted version – ‘I’m from Hong Kong, my Mum’s from mainland China, my Dad’s English’. But it is very tiresome to keep doing that. I have this double consciousness; there is never a moment where you are allowed to forget,” she says.
The slightly longer version is that her English father arrived in Hong Kong in the late 1950s to do his compulsory military service, where he met and married her mother, who had been born in mainland China.
The family relocated to the UK in the mid-1960s when Beadman was just two years old. After spending a few years in the Cotswolds west of London, Beadman’s family moved to the Isle of Man.
‘My life is a string of serendipities’: Hong Kong photo art gallery founder
‘My life is a string of serendipities’: Hong Kong photo art gallery founder
She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Reading and subsequently set up a small art studio in Hackney, London.
However, she soon realised her art alone could not support her livelihood, leading to her taking up a job in conservation, with a focus on medieval architecture from the 13th to 15th centuries.
In 1997, she was deeply moved while watching the handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule on television. By this time, her parents had returned to the city, and she visited whenever her finances permitted.
“I did not grow up speaking Cantonese, I’m not bilingual. I thought, ‘I’ll go to Hong Kong and see what happens’,” she says.
Beadman landed in Hong Kong in 1999. There wasn’t much call for specialists in medieval architecture in Hong Kong, so she took a position as a Native English Teacher at a school in Tuen Mun, in the New Territories.
We have evolved into a place where we say to an artist, ‘We’d like you to do something really experimental which pushes your practice in a new way.’
That provided her with financial stability and eventually, the time to delve into art. There wasn’t the space to make the wax sculptures she had made in the UK, so she went back to her first love, drawing and painting.
By the time she embarked on her MFA in Hong Kong, an RMIT University programme offered through the Hong Kong Art School, she was serving as an advisory teacher with the Education Bureau of the Hong Kong government.
Her real immersion into the world of art occurred when she had completed her MFA in 2015. She bought the Kwai Hing studio and soon afterwards left her government job.
She continues to teach occasionally as a sessional lecturer for RMIT University, which is based in Melbourne, Australia, and, thanks to her partner’s full-time job, manages to stay afloat financially.
Her MFA classmate and good friend Ho was working out of a small studio and brought some of her work over to Beadman’s studio to photograph it. The work looked good, so they decided to make a show and invite their friends.
Hong Kong gallery owner who went from film to photography via TVB anchor
Hong Kong gallery owner who went from film to photography via TVB anchor
Then another MFA friend, performance artist Ng, responded to the show with her work. A Facebook page and another show later, they decided to keep it going as a regular thing.
“We have evolved into a place where we say to an artist, ‘We’d like you to do something really experimental which pushes your practice in a new way. We’ll support you to do that by having a lot of critical dialogue with you,” Beadman says.
She has continued producing her own art all the while. Her work was recently shown in an exhibition at Pao Galleries in the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Wan Chai, where her gold and silver “Invisibility Cloaks” hung on the walls and guests were encouraged to slip one on and have some fun playing with ideas about who gets to be seen and who is invisible.
“The Invisibility Cloaks sit in that ambiguous space between our expectation, our assumptions and our lived experience of our reality. A lot of identity is about ‘What is your experience of being in the world, how do you see it?’” Beadman says.
These days, she treasures the close collaboration at Hidden Space with often young emerging artists, who she says often feel like family.
“We really want to keep it going. We have now a network of artists. These days my own practice is not more important than running the space. As you get older, you want to step aside, and nurture talent as opposed to only having a studio,” says Beadman.
Yip says he received a great deal of support and feedback from all three founders of Hidden Space.
“They always tell me: ‘Just go for it. You won’t know how anything will turn out if you just keep the idea in your head.’ That is probably my biggest takeaway from Hidden Space.”
“Sami Yip: Sunrise. Shift Your Weight”, Hidden Space, Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing, 1-6pm, Fri-Sun. Until May 5.
Additional reporting by Enid Tsui
