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
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.
Why should we do so? The most obvious reason is that youthful creative expression is one of the most powerful means for Hong Kong to re-engage its future talent and leaders in a way that puts personal and creative fulfilment at the fore. It is also simply the best way to revitalise the aesthetics of our city.
Much ink and capital has been spilled on the devising of complex schemes for urban renewal. A far more effective solution can be found in engaging with our young people who are genuinely passionate about their community.
Transformative subcultures, such as grime in the United Kingdom and hip-hop in the US, emerged in poor, working-class neighbourhoods – East London and the Bronx in New York – as a form of youth expression.
Here in Hong Kong, the bohemian cafes on Tai Nan Street in Sham Shui Po and the vibrant H.A.N.D.S basketball court in Tuen Mun have rejuvenated neighbourhoods and improved footfall.
There is also a reputational dimension to the co-creation of youth-friendly cultures in the city.
The greatest cities of today are those that can harness youth-led ecosystems of creative expression – think Beijing, London, New York or Tokyo. In Madrid, the Chueca neighbourhood is renowned for its celebration of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, helping the city attract LGBTQ travellers and progressive talent alike. Hong Kong’s stimulating street culture can play a similar role.
Street culture is not just street art; it also includes photography, writing and music that draws on the cityscape, as well as the celebration of the values embedded within such creations.
For far too long there has been a disconnect, between the youth and the elderly, between the bulk of Hong Kong’s population and its elite. While supporting, appreciating and offering a platform for cathartic street art creation will not fix the problem altogether, it would at least contribute to its resolution.
Much as the future belongs to the youth, this city belongs to all of us. And it’s our collective responsibility to make it more liveable, appealing and accommodating for all.
Brian Y. S. Wong is an assistant professor in philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, and a Rhodes Scholar and adviser on strategy for the Oxford Global Society
Damien Green is a finance-sector business leader, permanent resident of Hong Kong and founder of StudioKT, a community arts enterprise in Kwun Tong