Break in on the loading bay at any time and you will find something odd painters, sculptors and installation artists lugging crates of raw, half-finished paintings over to Brilliant Storage Limited 黃竹坑 迷你倉. Not only additional warehouse space. It is a secret repository as well as a starting point to the Southern District creatives of Hong Kong.
Coupled with low studio rents escaping to rising real estate and eccentric galleries being absorbed by property, artists needed to get innovative. Ministorage step: a sensible, even subterranean variant. Marble slabs and heavy tools are stocked by sculptors who are just a few minutes away old factories that have been converted to galleries. Light boxes and flimsy backdrops are stowed by photographers. These batteries mask altars of experiment and work with roll doors–small, however, powerful.
The truth is that humidity can be the bad guy in Hong Kong. Ministorage is climate controlled and guarded, hence paintings do not warp and sculptures do not stew. This small detail counts. And a recent art exhibition of wooden sculptures made of reclaimed wood, all of them sensitive to damp, will only have made it to the show at the last moment because the pieces had also spent months kept dry in a government storage yard in Wong Chuk Hang.
Pop up Gallery and festivals work on speed. Have the desire to clean up one performance and prepare the other? What saves the day is storage units, which are packed with wall panels, projectors, even crates of wine on opening night. One said she would joke that her time tables to exhibitors rested on the proximity of MTR and elevator capacities.
It is not sexy – no one is shooting films about fluorescent lighting aisles of storage. But behind each flamboyant Instagram entry is a closed-door pantry in Wong Chuk Hang where the actual art lurks, lives and sometimes takes off. Here it is the silent muscle behind the creative muscle-Hong Kong creators gradually piling the odds in their favour one storage box at a time.