Brave New World’s cultural vision paints a brighter future

“Creativity takes courage,”the French Fauvist painter Henri Matisse famously said. This is particularly true for property developers in growth-hungry but land-deprived Hong Kong.

Artistic revitilisation, however, breathes new life into communities and properties. New narratives and purposes are created for the neighbourhoods, with initiatives that can range from curating art galleries, installations and workshops within a building such as H Queens, to an overhaul of an unused governmental or private complex like the PMQ.

Hong Kong-listed New World Development (NWD) has taken the idea further by introducing the Artisanal Movement, the brainchild of Adrian Cheng Chi-kong, vice-chairman of, and third-generation heir to, the conglomerate.

NWD calls it a “cultural vision”, a “philosophy of living” that even extends as far as a celebration of humanity. The movement, which is taglined “collect, connect, collide”, emphasises “making” as a way for a sustainable lifestyle to rekindle the artisan spirit within everyone.

The movement has proved to be more than a whim of the Harvard-educated Cheng and is instead a “doctrine” that has laid down roots across NWD since Cheng was appointed executive director and joint general manager six years ago.

As the curator of the Artisanal Movement, NWD advocates imagination, craftsmanship, heritage and contemporary values, and is on a mission to repaint Hong Kong’s sense of both “city” and “home”. It maintains that it tries to steer clear of “the cookie-cutter approach” so that each project can assimilate into its neighbourhood to embrace the flavours and customs unique to that district.