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

Brian Y. S. WongandDamien Green

Published: 8:15am, 19 Aug 2023

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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.

Pedestrians pass murals by French painter Elsa Jean de Dieu outside Central Market in June 2021. Photo: Jonathan Wong

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.

Encouraging budding artists to grapple and work, literally, with the past while invoking the future is precisely what street art can do for urban renewal. New Street, Lascar Court and Art Lane are but a few of the sites where artists have left their imprints, adding an artistic tinge to Hong Kong’s vision of becoming a walkable city.

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.

White Noise Records on Tai Nan Street in Sham Shui Po in July. New art spaces and hip coffee shops coexist with older businesses in this part of Sham Shui Po. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

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.

The Hong Kong drag group keeping things raw – forget RuPaul’s Drag Race

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.

There is something in it for everyone, whether it be the nuances of the murals painted by those who integrate nature into their repertoire, the unapologetically confrontational graffiti that interrogates everyday assumptions, or the photographs of densely packed housing blocks, such as the buildings on King’s Road in Quarry Bay that found their way into Hollywood blockbusters Transformers: Age of Extinction and Ghost in the Shell.

Tourists take a selfie at Montane Mansion, popularly known as “monster building”, in Quarry Bay on August 14. The complex of five buildings became a tourist hotspot after it appeared in a Transformers film. Photo: Sam Tsang

Street art is an important conduit for teenagers and young adults to play a positive role in civic life and have a constructive dialogue with their peers and beyond. From the queer art challenging rigid norms on sexual orientation and gender identity to graffiti skewering the inequalities justified by a neoliberal logic, such as Banksy’s work, there is much wisdom to be found in the radical, avant-garde displays on the street.

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

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