Leafing through the city

Arty tales

As in the field of caring for the less privileged, Hong Kong also plays a widely-acknowledged leading role in the world of art. The story of Hong Kong's thriving art scene also figures in this year's Hong Kong Book Fair.

Internationally renowned art critic and the founder-director of Hanart TZ Gallery, Johnson Chang was in dialogue with Li Pi, head of curatorial affairs at M+, on Thursday as part of the Renowned Writers Seminar Series. A major driving force behind the robust development of the Hong Kong art scene, Chang seems optimistic about the city's continued interest in contemporary Chinese art. He feels the volume of investment in the cultivation of art - in art schools and museums like M+ as well as the newly opened Hong Kong Palace Museum, for instance - "reflects an engagement with the lineage of Chinese culture and civilization".

Chang is probably one of Hong Kong's best qualified people to speak on the ways in which attitudes to art have changed over the years. "I remember Hong Kong being a place where being an artist was not very elitist. It didn't add to your social credibility. Today there's much personal value in being an artist," Chang says.

While postcolonial influences remain strong in Hong Kong, "the feminist movement, race issues, gender and sexual identities" have added new dimensions to it, Chang explains. "They are very much parallel to the socially, economically and politically anchored postcolonial sensibilities."

The need to create spaces for conversations around art resulted in the "big push towards collectives". Chang himself co-founded Asia Art Archive with Claire Hsu in 2000.

It started a trend that is still ongoing. The emergence of more recent institutions like the Hong Kong Arts Collective and Yeti Out - a music collective consisting of DJs, promoters, producers and graphic designers - is a testament to Hong Kong's appetite for cultural discourse, Chang feels.