Burgeoning creates an cultural arts oasis scene
Hong Kong has gone the extra mile to nurture budding homegrown artists who are breathing new life into traditional Chinese culture, customs and art. Wang Yuke reports from Hong Kong.
If the comings and goings in Hong Kong’s arts and cultural scene in the past two decades were to be compiled into a storybook, it would be volumes of captivating evolutions with meaty food for thought, and chapters that would keep you in suspense.
To prove the point, one should look no further than the most recent edition of Art Basel — a major annual international event hosted by only three cities in the world so far — held in Hong Kong in May. The special administrative region is also the only Asian city to have hosted the art fair, which serves as a platform for galleries to showcase their works to buyers.
Other core arts events organized in the SAR include Art Central, which, as the centerpiece of the Hong Kong Art Month each year, vouches for boundary-pushing contemporary art; the Hong Kong Arts Festival — the pinnacle of the city’s performing arts events that regales arts aficionados with visual, auditory and intellectual feasts with a dazzling repertoire of performances and educational activities; and the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival that has been held since 2004, bringing brilliant Asian movies to the big screens of the “Hollywood of the East”.
As the very epitome of multiculturalism, Hong Kong has never ceased to enliven its art and cultural scene in the past decades by absorbing and assimilating novel art genres, alternative means of art expression, edgy art language and niche cultural phenomena, like a highly porous sponge. It’s in the “East-meets-West” city’s DNA to constantly reshuffle its art jigsaws and tweak with the fashion of presenting its cultures, while keeping traditional Chinese culture enshrined and grounded.
The “twists and turns” that Hong Kong has imaginatively incorporated into art are advanced technology and blockchain technology that have changed, and will reshape the way art is being created and consumed, says Pascal de Sarthe, owner of de
Sarthe Gallery. The gallery, founded in Paris in 1977, has become a fixture on Hong Kong’s art scene since it moved to the city in 2010, showcasing the works of impressionist, modern and contemporary artists.
“The evolution of new technology will be the next break in tradition in the art history of the 21st century. As a gallerist, I’ve always been interested in artists using new tools to express themselves within the context of the challenges of the evolution of their societies. That has been a major move in our gallery program,” says de Sarthe. His gallery represents a lot of contemporary Hong Kong and Chinese mainland artists who inventively fuse such advanced technologies as artificial intelligence and video games into their art creations.
De Sarthe says he’s thrilled to see the artists using state-of-the-art technologies as a creative medium rather than a marketing tool. “Our Shanghai-based, represented artist Wang Xin applied AI technology as a tool to keep evolving her use of art language and signs, to challenge the status of the artist and the functioning of today’s art market, criticizing the larger art ecosystem,” he says.
Hong Kong seems to have a keen sense of and accurate intuition in newly minted art phenomena, which explains why the city can cement its foothold in the global art scene. “Galleries, artists, auction houses and art fairs in Hong Kong have reacted swiftly and almost simultaneously to any new art trend or concepts. NFT artworks have become quintessential at the city’s art fairs, and auction houses have seen record-breaking sales from NFT art,” says Chris Tang, owner of SHOUT Art Hub & Gallery.
Nurturing talent
Another salient and heartening change in Hong Kong’s art ecosystem is that young emerging artists have been gaining due recognition and visibility, which help to thrust them into the international limelight.
Mak2, a local artist, counts herself as lucky, having embarked on her art journey in Hong Kong as the city unfurls a gateway for her to expand her mind and visions and allows her works to reach out to the world. “My works have been exhibited at Art Basel Hong Kong four times. Apart from the international exposure (that Hong Kong offers), I’m fortunate to have received good art education here,” she says.
Participating in art exhibitions on the mainland has also enlightened her artistically. The prowess of her mainland counterparts, their “high standard” works and their “crosssector and cross-media” ventures are inspiring, says Mak2.
“Art dens” are scattered across Hong Kong, where unfledged artists with limited budgets but unbridled muses share spaces with each other. Wong Chuk Hang on southern Hong Kong Island, for instance, is synonymous with artistic, creative, young and dynamic art that de Sarthe has an affinity for. Compared with Central, also a culturally effervescent area in the city, where prohibitive rentals and adequate but low-ceiling spaces aren’t artist-friendly, “Wong Chuk Hang reminds me of the Chelsea (neighborhood) in New York,” says de Sarthe. “With a few young galleries already there, it offers synergy and a sense of belonging to the art community,” he says. This made him move his gallery to Wong Chuk Hang in 2017.
There’re also galleries dedicated to empowering local young talented artists, affording them a bigger canvas and display window, which they would have found elusive in the nascent stage of their art career. Among them is SHOUT Gallery, which started in 2020 and has expanded into a compact studio of a decent scale.
Still young, SHOUT Gallery has hosted 20 exhibitions for more than 50 artists since 2021 — most of them solo exhibitions featuring artists from Hong Kong and the mainland. A majority of the exhibitions were held in the city’s shopping malls with sound foot traffic, offering adequate exposure for the artists’ works.
Tang said the SAR government has made “meaningful efforts” in recent years to nurture budding homegrown artists, such as providing them with government-funded art spaces like Oil Street Art Space in North Point and Para Site in Quarry Bay.
SHOUT Gallery is one of many Hong Kong galleries treasuring and celebrating traditional Chinese cultural roots and art forms, showcasing and representing artists who breathe new life into traditional Chinese culture, customs and art with contemporary twists to rekindle jaded interest. As a result, traditional Chinese culture and art, instead of being seen archaic and outmoded, can enjoy rejuvenation.
“Hong Kong has been a leading driving force for traditional Chinese painting development,” says Tang. “New Ink (Painting) Movement was founded in Hong Kong by a group of Hong Kong artists who have been breaking boundaries in traditional Chinese painting. The movement’s influence is lasting, and many young artists inspired by it continue to take Chinese painting in the contemporary context,” says Tang. A group exhibition centering on Chinese gongbi painting by young Hong Kong artists was held in May and was very well received, Tang added.
One of SHOUT’s latest exhibitions, Jimmy Rice Glitchy, highlighted contemporary works by established local young artist Jimmy Rice, who conceives his paintings based on the Peking Opera — the venerable Chinese artistic heritage — but reinterprets and delivers it from a contemporary prism by employing exuberant clashes of colors and freewheeling flourishes. Another of Rice’s works features a collection of sculptures centering on the Terracotta Warriors — a world cultural heritage — the embodiment of the Qin Dynasty’s (221-206 BC) strong army power.
There were also Lingnan-style brush paintings by both masters and young local successors at the same exhibition — a tribute to the esteemed art that had exerted tremendous influence on Chinese art in the 20th century.
“As a contemporary gallery, we take interest in art that’s relevant to our times and connected to our cultural roots,” says Tang. Speaking of his representative artist Simon Ma, Tang says: “We’re very impressed by his achievements and proud of the international footprint his works have left behind. SHOUT seeks to share with Hong Kong people that the creativity and artistic talents of Chinese art works are far-reaching and widely appreciated globally.”
Elements of style
Hong Kong’s ubiquitous kaleidoscope of cultures has caught the imagination of international artists, eliciting their impulse to explore their art expressions in the city. UK-born Szabotage used to be an architect and designer. Fascinated by Hong Kong’s multiculturalism and personality, he moved to the city with his family in 2013.
To Szabotage, Hong Kong immediately triggers his curiosity and has won his affection — the hustle and bustle, the juxtaposition of new and old architecture, and people’s survival tactics by making use of spaces. It’s the flurry of activities that pervades in Central, where “everyone’s trying to push his or her way through, whereas taxis and trolleys that collect cardboards (are maneuvering) here and there. Life is going on and everyone is just doing their own bit, which is quite different from where I used to live.”
There had already been a sporadic presence of street art in Hong Kong before 2013, but there are also gaps to fill, says Szabotage. This encouraged him to apply what he had acquired in his past artistic forays to make a mark in the city.
“As an expat who’s new to Hong Kong, I was refreshed and intrigued by all the city’s distinctive characteristics. Then, I figured, I could tap into all these exciting elements and my style could pick on different varieties of things that are out there. That fuels me as an artist,” he says.
Some of Szabotage’s works are inspired by and a testament to Hong Kong’s melting pot culture, featuring mixed cultural references omnipresent in the city, such as minibuses, the fire dragon dance, bauhinia flowers, the Victoria Harbour skyline, siumai (a traditional Cantonese dim sum) or the city’s Mister Softee. But they’re interspersed with symbolic tokens belonging to other cultures. The city’s multiculturalism allows Szabotage a lot of room to wiggle to harness his stencil language. “What I’m doing essentially is reporting my experience in the city. I’m reporting it (what I encounter) in this visual language with different types of cultural subject matters I see here,” says Szabotage. This would allow every viewer to find an association in his paintings. In a nutshell, his street art-esque paintings are both “observational” and “conversational”.
Art is a give-and-take affair that involves input and output from the creator and the audience. Artists alone do not decide how invigorating the art and cultural vibe is in a city, that is determined equally by the reception from beholders.
Creating art is mostly a solitary practice, where artists play with and execute their ideas in their own studios, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak, says Szabotage. But, before the pandemic, he would paint live on the streets, usually stopping passersby in their tracks. “It’s very encouraging and motivating to see people showing keen intrigue and willingness to get engaged,” he says. “The range of people is incredible. It might be a 4-year-old who was just pushing his mother and said, ‘Look, Mommy!’, avid art lovers or the elderly who are just looking to pass the time.”
Having said that, art practitioners expect more in-depth and knowledge-driven conversations among artists, collectors or art consumers in general. The highly “speculative art market” dictates that people collect and buy art “with their ears, not eyes,” argues de Sarthe. He’s yearning to hear dialogue that’s less commercial, but more substantial.