This article examines how contemporary Hong Kong artists have embraced ‘smallness’ as a critical aesthetic strategy in the post-handover era, turning away from monumentality and overt political commentary to engage with the social textures of the everyday. Focusing on the practices of Lee Kit, Tozer Pak Sheung Chuen and Lam Tung Pang, the article explores how quiet gestures, mundane materials and ephemeral forms offer alternative modes of artistic subjectivity and political presence amidst Hong Kong’s evolving postcolonial condition. Building on Winnie Wong’s theorization of smallness, the article proposes an expanded framework that interprets smallness not as a symptom of constraint, but as a deliberate and generative mode of engagement. Connecting the notion of ‘smallness’ with Ackbar Abbas’s concept of disappearance, the article argues that these minor practices form an aesthetics of negotiation and survival that unsettles dominant representational paradigms, while foregrounding intimacy, contingency and community. Through close readings of artworks and analysis of the Fo tan artist community, the article situates smallness as both a formal strategy and a relational ethos that redefines the function and politics of contemporary art in Hong Kong.
Alice Fung (Sat,) studied this question.