‘Let go of art, run naked and free’

Causes of Stress for Community Artists

The last entry in Hiking, Music and Dinner Conversation, I wrote about an overnight campsite retreat with fellow community artists. The relaxing atmosphere where we chatted about life, played badminton, and made music, sometimes veering off into work related discussion, make me regret not having started this years ago.

Of course, when the idea came up a decade ago, I was thinking about ‘productive’ retreats where we would talk about work and the future of the organization. Perhaps it never materialized because no one was feeling up to back-to-back meetings disguised as ‘retreat’.

What we needed all this time, was real rest away from our work. I finally understood.

What causes your stress?

Several artists replied my question, and here are their responses compiled:

· Too much work or too little work

· Working with a group/community’s energy, feeling it, processing and responding to it

· Building relationship with people in short time

· Differing expectations among teachers, social workers, funders and etc.

· Participant responses

· Always listening and not listened

· Funding

· Much administrative and logistic work

· Getting back to work unprepared psychologically

· Networking for more opportunities

I am not going to analyse them. Please just accept that these are valid causes for stress.

Returning to work during pandemic

Several artists have responded that once the situation was safe to hold workshops, they were swamped by requests to make up weeks of missed lessons in a short time. At the same time, anticipation of upcoming lockdown and workshop cancellation creates new anxiety. This is common to many artists.

Hong Kong in 2020

The pandemic has hit all of us by surprised. In the winter of 2020, I was consulting with various organizations on workshops to respond to people impacted by the political situation in Hong Kong. Before we knew it, we were hit with the pandemic and its creeping anxiety as the weeks dragged on.

Personally, I am still trying to make peace with it and to deal with it. A fellow’s artist’s words helped me put things in perspective while bringing a smile to my tired expressions (forgive my translation if it loses some of its flavour):

“It is stressful being in this Time and Place, feels like I am a speck of dust or detergent in a washing machine. I need to rest because I need to put art down for a while, to run free and naked”.

唔～受壓力啊⋯⋯可能是時代太巨大，有時唔知自己是洗衣機內的一粒塵定一粒洗衣粉。需要休息的原因，就是想放低藝術，好好去裸奔