Bordering domesticity: Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong’s contemporary art

Since the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of migrant domestic workers from the Philippines have moved to Hong Kong. As they filled the city’s growing demand for care work, they also altered the city’s art practice and cultural landscape. In this article, I propose to consider a double meaning of ‘domesticity’ ‐ in both the language of motherhood and motherland ‐ as a productive framework to investigate the migratory experience of Filipina domestic workers. Focusing on Cedric Maridet’s Filipina Heterotopia and Xyza Cruz Bacani’s We Are Like Air, I examine how ‘domesticity’ has become particularly pertinent to understanding the ‘border’ through the movement of bodies and the global transferral of care labour.