Memories of 31 June 1997 is a looped video which presents a slow-motion transit of the space between the Hong Kong and Shenzhen immigration points of the Hong Kong , Mainland China internal border. We have already left Hong Kong when the video starts but we never arrive in China even though the video is over an hour and a quarter in length. The soundtrack for this video features a collection of oral history interviews conducted with people concerning their memories of 31 June 1997, a non-existent day between the end of British sovereignty over Hong Kong on 30 June 1997 and the beginning of Chinese sovereignty on 1 July 1997. Around fifty people were interviewed over a period of several years (beginning in 2013). These anonymous interviewees all have some connection to Hong Kong but not all of them were in Hong Kong at the time in question.

David Clarke is both an art historian and a visual artist. Trained in London, he moved to Hong Kong in 1986 to take up employment at the University of Hong Kong, where he worked till 2017. Clarke’s art historical research has been primarily in the areas of American and Chinese art history, and his sole-author books include: The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture (1988); Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization (2001); Water and Art (2010); and Chinese Art and its Encounter with the World(2011). As a visual artist Clarke has exhibited his work in Hong Kong and around the world on more than sixty occasions during the last thirty years, including several one-person museum shows in Hong Kong and an extensive one-person exhibition in Britain. He has published two photo books concerning Hong Kong: Reclaimed Land: Hong Kong in Transition (2002) and Hong Kong x 24 x 365: A Year in the Life of a City (2007). Recent projects have focused on artistic collaboration: he undertook a dialogue with performance artist Kwok Mangho, with the composers Chan Hing-yan and Joyce Wai-Chung Tang (who have both separately written musical compositions in response to Clarke’s photographic images), and with creative writer Xu Xi (a word/image dialogue was published in 2016 as Interruptions by the University Museum and Art Gallery, HKU). Clarke is the founder and academic director of the Hong Kong Art Archive (http://finearts.hku.hk/hkaa/), and has played major public service roles for organizations such as the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, and the College Art Association. A series of 73 lectures by Clarke on modern art is freely available online athttp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsYxtdAdqBSfNEVf2Y9WsN1YyOe-5G52i.