Brian Y. S. WongandDamien Green

Opinion | A Hong Kong relaunch must create space for youth art and culture

Instead of devising complex urban renewal schemes, it would be more effective to offer young people open platforms for creative expression

This would not only be a powerful means for the city to re-engage its future talent, but is also simply the best way to revitalise urban aesthetics

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Brian Y. S. WongandDamien Green

Published: 8:15am, 19 Aug 2023

As a city synthesising Chinese cultural heritage, British historical influences and ties with the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, characterised by a fundamental openness to international friends and travellers from near and far, Hong Kong is home to 7.5 million people speaking in a thousand voices.

As we seek to embark on a new direction following the past few difficult years, arts and culture have a crucial role to play in establishing the tenor of this relaunch and we have a great deal of work to do to foster this.

Fortunately, Hong Kong has long been renowned for its local creative arts and cultural pluralism. There’s illustrator Don Mak, who sublimates the hustle and bustle of crowded neighbourhoods such as Tuen Mun and Yuen Long. We have the geometric precision of photographer William Leung’s images of our housing estates.

Then there’s the stunning contemporary performance art of Hong Kong Soul, which staged three programmes at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Elsa Jean de Dieu’s sweeping, vivid murals on Hong Kong Island.

The urban hyper-modernity overlaying the original industrial grittiness of Hong Kong’s streets is an organic accelerator of the creative arts. The city’s growing collective of creative talent draws on a healthy bricolage of old, new, Asian and Western traditions along with organic trends in various stages of evolution, often using our post-industrial urban landscape as their canvas.

When it comes to the art of Hong Kong’s young people, we must encourage and enable more who find fulfilment in creative expression in any medium. In particular, we should offer them unfettered platforms – without sanitising the cacophony that renders the art so spontaneously powerful – through open-air exhibitions, street festivals and select studio spaces where the youth get to run the show.

Opinion | A Hong Kong relaunch must create space for youth art and culture

Instead of devising complex urban renewal schemes, it would be more effective to offer young people open platforms for creative expression This would not only be a powerful means for the city to re-engage its future talent, but is also simply the best way to revitalise urban aesthetics

Instead of devising complex urban renewal schemes, it would be more effective to offer young people open platforms for creative expression

This would not only be a powerful means for the city to re-engage its future talent, but is also simply the best way to revitalise urban aesthetics