Café do Brasil: Re-savouring the Space of the Intellectuals

Description

Through the 1960s and ‘70s Café do Brasil, a now well-known harbour view café on the second floor of Ocean Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui, was a gathering place for young intellectuals. Despite only appearing through oblique references in literary accounts or memoirs, Café do Brasil is known to have been a place where social and political ideas were discussed expansively by some of the brightest and most challenging minds of the time.

Curator Qu Chang has taken the spirit of Café do Brasil, and all its successors that have since embedded themselves into the winding history of Hong Kong’s cultural spaces, as the catalyst for an exhibition that actively invites visitors to join a shared discussion to explore how we connect with one another in society. At a time when notions of ‘publicness’ are fraught in contemporary reality, Café do Brasil reflects on this historical site, not to confine our imaginations to a nostalgia for what is now history, but instead to urge us to appropriate, reshape and expand our ideas into different subversive blueprints for the future.