Offsite: Christopher K. Ho by Godfre Leung

 
This unwakefulness also informs memories of Vancouver in the 1990s, when mass migration from Hong Kong and the large-scale urban development that coincided with it changed the city and its surrounding municipalities beyond recognition. Accompanying Vancouver’s dramatic growth in the 1990s was a remapping of the city from its previous position as the terminal city of settler-colonialist expansion to a connective transcontinental node—a shift also between the epistemologies of the train station and the airport. In 1997, long-time Hong Kong University literature professor Ackbar Abbas characterized Hong Kong as “a city of transients,” adding that “much of the population was made up of refugees or expatriates who thought of Hong Kong as a temporary stop, no matter how long they stayed.”^² In the flight home staged in CX 889, this spirit of transnationality suggests a sense of diaspora beyond the old “model minority” narrative of immigration–settlement–assimilation.
 
CX 889 is the sequel to Ho’s 2018 exhibition CX 888, held at de Sarthe Gallery in Hong Kong. That earlier project, named after Cathay Pacific’s complementary Hong Kong–Vancouver–New York flight, was conceived in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, when Ho first contemplated leaving his long-time home of New York for Hong Kong, where he immigrated to the US from as a child and where he now lives and works. Remaking an airplane cabin from portable furniture from big-box stores—two columns of collapsible deckchairs adjusted to recline at the angle of 1980s business-class seats, facing a pair of flatscreens separated by an aisle’s width—CX 888 meditated on the phenomenon of reverse-diaspora. As a pair, the two CX works share a concern not only with the realities and tropologies of Asian mobilities but also with Vancouver as a central yet paradoxically also peripheral site for these mobilities.
 
As Ho describes: “Passengers disembark late at night between New York, the postwar West’s financial capital, and Hong Kong, the Far East’s, into a holding pen at Vancouver International Airport… They are in limbo, with only a closed Tim Hortons doughnut cart to indicate the country nominally occupied. The no-place of the elusive doughnut hole is perhaps a fitting metaphor.”^³
 
In Vancouver, “Hong Kong” is a loaded term. As Vancouver author Holman Wang wrote in 1998, “The history of the relationship between geography and race has been a history of change.”⁴ For some immigrants this city was temporary, for others an indefinite provisional home, for yet others a planned new home and for many an unexpected permanent home. A flight layover may not be the most likely metaphor for the communities that formed within the commingling of these different desires, but as CX 889 places us—that is, Vancouver—at the bottom of the Kai Tak ramps, in the position of receiving its passengers, it asks us to think multiply about our affiliations and affinities.
 
CX 889 is a work about two places at the same time, and the formlessness of our experiences, now memories, of this liminality. It unpacks these two places from two other places that they each changed into very quickly, and unfolds them into two places that are and always have been multiple—and that maybe also are not or weren’t really places, in certain senses of that word.