Establishing a Practice: The Hong Kong Community Arts Archive Catalogue Initiative
Edited transcript of a presentation at the Asian Pacific Community Music Network Conference 2020 in HK (on zoom)
Why is it a good time to establish such a Catalogue? Looking back at the last two decades, the community arts has become better and more sophisticated in Hong Kong, receiving increased recognition and resource; to a point that it is becoming a gimmick. However, within this growth, there are mismatched languages and expectations among stakeholders; behind which signals a lack of discourse and development.
For example, the social welfare sector transitioned early from conventional art activities to participatory formats. Being government-run or funded, their contracting of community arts has meant stable community presence, participants and money. However, government money comes with a catch: performance indicators are primarily based on headcount and spending. And while heads and staff of individual centres can plan and execute projects in a way that is true to the spirit of the community arts, the overall funding structure and the values behind it is slow to change.
Next is the area of education. I have only started teaching community and socially-engaged arts in post-secondary level since 2016, and even though students know about this form of practice, they are not certain how one trains for it, what it has to do with their studio training, and how to form an opinion of it.
It took me a couple of terms to gather local case studies and writings to teach, but because this practice is so specific to a place, overseas projects and facilitators, no matter how amazing, can’t get students excited enough or care enough to engage wholeheartedly and critically.
What we need in Hong Kong, is more and better documentation and writings to establish the nature of the practice specific to us. We need to know what we have been doing, who has been making it happen, how and why we are doing this, and what is on the horizon for us. We need an imagination specific to us.
The vision of the Catalogue is that it is Free to use by any stakeholders, highly accurate, cooperatively developed and maintained, and we hope to make the items in the catalogue more accessible to the general public, not just to academics.
There are two questions that I get asked very often: By Hong Kong, we mean community arts that happened in HK, anything done by HK practitioners, and anything written by HKers. By community arts, we mean anything that is identified, theoretically or culturally; and this includes community music, dance, theatre and etc. Two further explanations: a) Even if an overwhelming number of people believe a project not to be community art, the fact that it self-proclaims to be community arts, is of research value. b) We are happy to debate, but not interested in a black and white definition of the various names of practices. Finally, at this point we are only cataloguing text materials.
The catalogue is for a range of stakeholders involved in making the community arts happen.
Let’s take a look at some visuals.
At its core, the catalogue is a spreadsheet available for download and use. We welcome public input.
On social media we are slowly building a network of users and contributors. The best responses so far are book recommendations by practitioners, social workers and teachers. The page is almost entirely in Chinese. Even though most of us are bilingual, it just makes it much more welcoming to users. But the Catalogue itself is English-based, and each entry is dependent on the language of the item.
Finally, in the next two months before funding runs out, there are 3 more things to achieve.
First, we will test-launch in November (hopefully next weekend), and get as much feedback as possible.
Second, I have been networking to increase users, gain access to NGO’s collections, and to find people to form a committee that will be its custodian in the long run.
Finally, looking at the catalogue, the first thing I want to do is to compile entries on certain topics to create mini teaching pack for teachers to use.
Looking at this catalogue, I already have a bunch of thesis ideas, book ideas and teaching pack ideas. I am certain users out there will make good use of it, and take part in establishing the community arts in Hong Kong through reading, writing and ultimately research and practice. And I hope the catalogue can also be a window through which overseas practitioners learn about what we are doing here.
Thank you, and I look forward to your comments.
