Documenta 12 Magazines Feature on Education Potentially Wise? The Boom in Hong Kong Contemporary Arts Education Jaspar K. W. Lau

Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler, potentiell. –Joseph Beuys1

he field of contemporary art is increasingly recognized as one of global production and consumption. But how is contemporary art education possible when the question T“What is Art?” the new paradigmatic thesis of contemporary aesthetics (the legacy of Marcel Duchamp), remains a nominalistic one? In our educational institutions, the traditional methodologies of art history are threatened not just by the growth of new approaches to art history as in past decades, but also by new challenges arising out of some even deeper self- reflectivity: a re-recognition of its own nature as just another kind of art historical writing on the one hand, and claims of the end of art history itself on the other. The high/low de-hierachization of visual culture, proclaiming itself an heir of postmodernism, is taking on the canon too, while the grand narrative of art history dissolves into pluralized, de-centred, multi-cultural “stories of art.” In spite of all this, the practical stream of art-teaching worldwide seems to keep the supply of students going strong. This short article will not be able to delve into surveying the complex interdisciplinary relationship among art education and aesthetics, art history, theory, or visual culture. Yet it will try to cast these disciplines within their specific local perspectives and consider them together under the constellation of the problem of modernity and contemporary aesthetics.

I.

First, a bit of background. Art education in Hong Kong over the past decade has experienced a spectacular boom. For a long period, the Department of Fine Arts of New Asia College (first launched in 1957), which was later incorporated into the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUFA, founded in 1963), represented the prime source of new graduates entering the art field. The annual B.A. class for CUFA is made up of a little more than twenty students. Despite its early and continuing focus of Ph.D.s in art history in Chinese art, the current role model for Hong Kong art education is a unique combination of studio practice and art history studies drawn from both Chinese and Western art. In contrast, the Department of Fine Arts of the Hong Kong University, established in 1978, tends to focus primarily on art history.

The boom that I refer to can be considered to have begun in the 1990s. The Polytechnic (with its School of Design) was upgraded to a university in 1994. City Polytechnic founded its School of Creative Media a bit later, in 1998. Then the Art School, founded in 2000 (renamed Hong Kong Art School in 2006, hereafter referred to as HKAS), evolved from the Arts Centre Education Department courses it had offered since 1994 and started its first part-time degree in collaboration with Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1999. According to the HKAS Web site, the school has a student body of over 4,000, with almost 800 “full-time-equivalent” students, an alumni figure of over 100,000, and a faculty list of nearly 200.2

The latest wave in this boom is the recent addition of the Academy of Visual Arts at the Hong Kong Baptist University, launched in 2005 with some forty students and now settled in one of the

103 former Royal Air Force officers' mess halls, a 3,500-square-metre historical building of twentieth- century colonial architecture. In contrast, the Creative Media department of the City University is expecting to move into new headquarters designed by Daniel Libeskind. Even at the pre-tertiary level, arts education in Hong Kong is undergoing huge changes, not just in curricula, but also with ambitious projects such as the Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity. This newly opened upper-level secondary school, founded by the Hong Kong Institute of Contemporary Culture, is among the first to try to break away from mainstream curriculum that is set for the general secondary schools by the Education and Manpower Bureau by providing courses oriented to the creative industries.

Alongside such huge expansions in the size and scale of these institutions, the number of courses provided is quickly escalating. CUFA’s M.F.A. program began only in 1995, marking another milestone in local arts education development. Prior to this, artists usually had to go overseas to get a taste of what was on offer in M.F.A. programs. While artists who study abroad and then return to Hong Kong represent a continued and forceful push in the development of the local arts scene, their numbers remained limited. The HKAS master’s class just had its first graduation exhibition this summer; this class included more than twenty students, with around fifteen anticipated for each of the coming years. This is already five times or more the number of M.F.A. students CUFA produces annually. The Academy of Visual Arts of the Baptist University is also planning to launch an M.A. program in 2007.

Though it is not part of the HKAS program, RMIT also produced two D.F.A.s [doctors of fine art], who are now both working at HKAS. One of them is Ho Siu Kee, the Academic Head of HKAS Director’s office. He was formerly a CUFA B.A. graduate, and he then completed his M.F.A. at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, before the local M.F.A. program began. But unlike his teacher, Chan Yuk Keung, who also studied at Cranbrook and has taught at CUFA since 1989 (the same year for Ho’s graduation there), Ho then further enrolled in RMIT and obtained his D.F.A.3 This seems a clear example of how local artists, with help from overseas resources, can further their studies, and, more importantly, re-invest their knowledge and experience into local art education.

II.

To further illustrate this situation, I will focus on HKAS, the newcomer that best represents this boom. Although a much younger institution than CUFA, HKAS has quickly outgrown its forerunner in scale and ambition. Taking over as the major source of art education in Hong Kong, HKAS inevitably has to satisfy much of the arts community’s expectations that were previously shouldered by CUFA. In light of this, the main question that has been repeatedly asked, as was evident in the 2003 CUFA 40th anniversary publication Cheng Ming in All Directions, is whether the focus of CUFA should even be on producing artists.

But while CUFA as a university offering a B.A. degree has the tradition of providing a general education, early discussion in the arts community about the founding of a proper art school was aimed at pushing toward more focused and professional art training. Of course, no one could be so naive as to believe the small local art scene could really sustain so many new graduates with M.F.A.s as artists. Nor could anyone be so blind as to not see that a healthy art ecology needs more than just artists. But as the B.A. students of CUFA could only take either the practical or the art history stream and share a number of courses with another stream, their training in CUFA was not particularly occupational specific.

104 HKAS, on the other hand, offers professional certificate courses in arts management. At one point, under the guidance of project director of Oscar Ho, HKAS even offered professional certificate courses in visual arts management and curatorship with guest lecturers coming from the Guggenheim. (Note: the latest news is that Oscar Ho has joined the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong as the programme director for their MA Programme in Cultural Management. Meanwhile, Pamela Kember has taken over as the programme coordinator teaching professional certificate in exhibition studies and art curatorship at the Art School.)

But education is tricky, because besides being a reproduction mechanism for society, it is also about investing in and shaping the future. Under a new entrepreneurial spirit, this boom in arts education seems to suggest a reverse argument: that only with a sufficient pool of talent and subsequent practitioners can the supply break the deadlock and produce a cultural ecology and market demand that was previously non-existent. The problem with this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy is, of course, that the bright future has not yet become a reality. So, meanwhile, there seem to be two ways to dissect this phenomenon. One is that art education keeps inflating itself and advancing itself in the name of professionalization; the other moves in quite a different direction, that of expansion of knowledge about the future of the creative industries.

Instead of becoming artists, many CUFA students became art educators in the pre-tertiary level, using their B.A. degrees as teaching qualifications. Yet the M.F.A.s, with their more advanced qualifications, were in a better position to enter a higher level of teaching. By sustaining themselves via part-time teaching in different tertiary institutions, or the now new option of HKAS, they are able to retain, to a certain degree, their status as artists.

The boom in Hong Kong hence represents the ripening of a local self-reproduction mechanism that can also be seen as a reflection of the global M.F.A. boom.4 The flip side here is, of course, that teaching is a much more secure occupation than being an artist, especially considering that there is still no sustainable art market. And even in the last few years, B.A., then M.F.A., graduates of HKAS are teaching at their alma mater in no small numbers.

But what draws B.A. students in? Or where does the optimism seemingly come from, if even teachers are unable to make a living out of being an artist? According to Matthew Turner, Director of HKAS, the supply of polytechnic arts education in Hong Kong still lags far behind his home country of Scotland. Nevertheless, a great shift has actually occurred here in what we are talking about as arts education. HKAS at least has a clear distinction between its degrees in Fine Art and that of Applied and Media Arts.

The key here is undoubtedly the seeming link between “creativity” in modern arts education and the anticipation of future jobs in the “creative industries.”5 Except for the few universities fortunate enough to have funding to carry out academic research, most of them are not exempt from becoming occupational factories. “The polytechnics, re-imagined by Margaret Thatcher’s government as the liberal arts universities,” as scholar James Elkins ironically puts it,6 seems to speak to the situation here too.

The program objectives of the Academy of Visual Arts of the Baptist University state plainly that the university “will cultivate artists and designers who can meet the urgent need of the creative industry in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta to produce artistic works incorporating fine

105 arts skills and computer graphics.”7 The mission statement of the School of Creative Media is no exception: “[Students] are being prepared to assist the media industries in adapting to change and new technologies and in creating world standard content. . . . They are also well-equipped to understand the business and legal environments in which media industries operate.”8

From the point of view of the government, what could be better than having all these educational detours (starting from different certificate and diploma courses, many of which are self-financed) to help lift the burden of a high youth unemployment rate? Creative industries are thought of as the panacea for a seemingly stagnate post-97 Hong Kong economy, able to generate money by duplicating a British example. With the major project of the West Kowloon Cultural and Entertainment district, the city naively assumes there will be a boost in the culture industry and tourism (and, maybe, in turn, lessen the unemployment rate among the “overeducated”?).

Unlike the subsidized universities, HKAS inevitably has its own marketing concerns. This is most clearly illustrated in the marketing strategies that reveal what the boom in arts education is actually about. Executive director of HKAS Louis Yu understands well the “technology plus creativity means money” formula and that “people often associate creativity with art” is the reason that many people now spend time learning art.9 Even the motto for HKAS, “lifelong learning for arts and creativity,” was half borrowed from the government’s propaganda encouraging citizens to enrol in continuous education and different value-enhancement programs.

III.

As the boom in arts education moves in these new directions, a comparative reduction in the visibility of fine arts departments in the universities is already starting to be felt. With high-profile guest lecturers utilizing its campus downtown, with the publishing of its own regular art magazine, and with a tiny gallery run by its alumni, HKAS has been exploring new areas in which to reach the public and interact with the community (well understood as a source of potential customers). But as art schools and universities approach art education on different footings, a differentiation between them should lead to positive ends in the long run. So far, the major differences likely arise from the different types of students who are drawn to enrol.

While art schools becoming less immune to market demands may not be such a bad thing, it would be frightening if universities were to move in the same direction. Yet, there is also the grave danger of the fine arts departments in universities moving too much in the opposite direction. By clinging to conservative modes of art history studies, it could become increasingly pedantic and detached from the contemporary art scene, as well as society. A good comparison and contrast in this respect could be made, with, say, the kinds of guest lectures, forums, workshops, publications, or online articles that the independent Asia Art Archive has produced that serve the arts community in engaging and accessible ways.

Throughout the years, the strength of the university model has helped neither scholars nor artists foster a vibrant local milieu in the critical discourse on contemporary art. Art history, as a nineteenth-century construct, as the dominant component of the academic discipline, as the unquestioned way of learning about art, might have something to do with it. The annual Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook from CUFA (with additional funding from the Hong Kong Arts Development Council) was perhaps the best effort by the art historians to try to bridge the gap with the local art scene, yet it kept itself visibly distant from art criticism of an interventionist nature.

106 Art criticism and theory were never specially encouraged within the CUFA B.A. course structure. These subjects seem, however, to have gained a bit more attention in the past few years via the addition of a new course, Art as Profession, and the hiring of a foreign professor who is not only well versed in theory, but, more importantly, eager to write for local, non-academic publications. Yet, to study further in contemporary art theory and its discourses, one has to switch departments and enter Cultural Studies or Comparative Literature instead.

Cross-disciplinary coordination between university departments, too, is unfortunately rare. Even though courses in aesthetics might be provided by the Philosophy department, at CUFA, for example, they are at times taught by professors more inclined toward the analytic aesthetics of the Anglo-American tradition, leaving other forms of contemporary aesthetics untouched. To fill in such gaps, since 1999 the Arts Development Council overseas scholarships scheme has helped a number of local practitioners studying outside of Hong Kong, resulting in some M.A.s being received in the Feminism and the Visual Arts program at the University of Leeds in the U.K.

One noteworthy local university department that offers more interdisciplinary studies in the arts is the Visual Studies Program in the Department of Philosophy at Lingnan University, which is also among the first local institutions to set up a Cultural Studies department. The curious thing about this landing of visual culture in Hong Kong is that it happened outside of the few strongholds of tertiary arts education. Its import seemed therefore irrelevant to the general crisis in art history as it has appeared elsewhere. Some professors teaching visual culture do not seem to have any particular interest in raising theoretical challenges to the disciplinary mode of art history as taught in the local establishments, or vice versa.

IV.

But I am neither a proponent of visual culture nor a sympathizer with art history facing its end. Art history, in scholar Thierry de Duve’s words, is “first of all constituted by the evidential record of previous aesthetic judgments.”10 The kind of art history that pretends to be scientific, shying away from recognizing itself as judgmental and value-laden, built up a distance between the object of study and its observer that might, in contrast to visual culture, make it barely relevant to the real world. On the other hand, its logic actually parallels visual culture in levelling the difference between “high” and “low.”

More importantly, contemporary art experience has made traditional art history methodology irrelevant as historiography became problematic after the finale of modernism, as scholar Hans Belting suggests.11 Yet, contra the art history that seems to lag behind its contemporary challenges, it is as interesting to consider how many cultural studies scholars came to acknowledge that their discipline “has lost its way”12 and hurried to jump on the bandwagon of visual culture. Even the Hong Kong Institute of Education has published a book of collected essays on visual culture in an attempt to introduce it to primary and secondary arts education.

For visual culture, two critical comments from different perspectives can help us see the symptoms in current arts education. The first one comes from scholar Rosalind Krauss in the special October issue reporting on their questionnaire about visual culture. To her, what visual studies really does is help “to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital”13 (or “better consumers,”14 as James Elkins would put it, more bluntly). The other one comes again from Elkins, in his Skeptical

107 Introduction to Visual Culture, that “what matters most is the ease: visual studies is too easy to learn, too easy to practice, too easy on itself.”15

Instead of choosing between visual culture (postmodernism) or art history (of a post-history era), I rather see modern aesthetics as the key to the problem of modernity, and staying within its paradigm. The nominalist crisis of contemporary art Duchamp posed to Kant’s aesthetics16 actually resembles the “groundless ground” as mentioned in scholar Scott Lash’s Another Modernity.17 I did not intend to explicate this personal position of mine in detail here, but I hopefully show how it all comes full circle where I am back at the primal question that I raised at the forefront, “How is art education possible?”

V.

In one of the HKAS promotional posters, a number of these questions were posed and answered with wit:

Can art be taught? Art can be learnt. Is art a profession? Integrity and discipline form the basis of professionalism. Is talent requisite in art learning? Practice makes talent visible. Should we aim for innovation in art making? The exploratory process is more significant than the innovative outcome.18

Yet in demonstrating their wit, these sentences also exposed the Achilles's heel of the modern art education paradigm, which could be summarized in Joseph Beuys’s dictum that potentially “everyone is an artist” in mind as the myth of creativity.

“Art can be learnt,” for example, avoids confronting arguments posed in Elkins’s Why Art Cannot be Taught. “Practice makes talent visible,” too, does not dare to challenge the modern academic pedagogic view of arts education that upholds creativity as a faculty natural to all (instead of just the gifted). On the contrary, art education often reinforces the professional status of the artist alongside other “professionals.” This preservation of the artist’s unique status, rather than encouraging reflexivity, even self-doubt, is still very much at the heart of art education.

“Is art a profession?” is in this regard also a kind of self-parody, especially if one remembers the fact that art schools here are filled with artists surviving as educators (part-time lecturers). Ho Siu Kee himself once suggested that Chan Yuk Keung went straight from an M.F.A. to teaching, and the experience he could provide is that of a teacher rather than an artist.19 A second level of parody is art schools that claim that they do not aim to “turn out” artists, but do stress professionalism.

Locally speaking, “art as a career” is still a relatively novel idea (one traceable record has to be Leung Chi Wo’s account of how this idea came to him during his internship in Jan Hoet’s museum and his subsequent trip with the team to Documenta in 1992).20 But with a number of graduates returning from the United Kingdom during the past few years, the “Young British Artists” phenomenon has undoubtedly been taken as a model for artists of the younger generation. The “occupational hazard” (marketing skills, contacts, confidence, just name a few, for cut-throat survival) of the myths about the “YBA” phenomenon of spectacle and stardom is still relatively unacknowledged. Reflected this is Chan Yuk Keung’s complaint that the recent practice of “marketing and strategizing,” in gaining recognition, has overtaken the importance of the quality of the art itself.21

108 Lane Relyea wrote in Public Offering, “the art school, with its supposedly solitary environment encouraging the undistracted pursuit of studies . . . [is] now perceived as totally enmeshed within the web of market forces. . . . Such increased proximity between commerce and art education has been paralleled by a rise in dismissal of criticism as no different from product promotion.”22 In a review appearing in the HKAS publication, part-time lecturer Enoch Cheung recently mused on whether to call his art students artists. This might seem trivial at first sight, but as discussed in Public Offering, some “Global Academies” (art schools such as CalArts) do emphasize that they treat their students not as students, but as artists who happen to be in school.23 What does this imply? Some psychology of careerism?

In one of his recent texts, titled “monologue,” Chan Yuk Keung reflects upon the mutual influence between his teaching and artistic practice. Such literature is rare and worth quoting at length:

My position at the university has given me its advantages as well as its limitations. At least I would be concerned if the approach and presentation met a certain “professional expectation.” . . . At present, when certain areas of “chain development” in Hong Kong art have yet to reach professional levels, artists are the ones who simultaneously play different roles, as educators, critics, and cultural agents . . . . In this sense, the word “artist” cannot refer only to people working in a particular area of art. Yet, the role of “art educator” is even more complicated. S/he must agree and understand the universal values of art and their actual application in society, and at the same time be able to demonstrate the feasibility of certain ideas. . . . As an artist, I tend to choose approaches that are “accountable” and ”understandable” as a framework for creation, whereby I expect to experience elements of design during the production process of my works. . . . I could search for a rational but unconventional solution. This type of work is generally considered as “witty,” but lacks “wisdom.” . . . My artistic orientation directs my basic belief as an art teacher—the activity of art is nowadays an intellectual exercise of knowledge. . . . Sometimes, the pursuit of “universality” (as an art teacher) and the pursuit of “uniqueness” (as an artist) conflict with each other.24

It is no wonder that in another interview, Chan Yuk Keung exposed his gradually increasing doubt about the idea that a good teacher can also be a good artist.25 Maybe, as James Elkins put it in one of the many “why art cannot be taught” propositions, “great art cannot be taught, but most run- of-the-mill art can be,”26 but what interests me even more is Chan Yuk Keung’s contrast of wisdom with wit.

The wit of the HKAS promotional poster’s questions and answers evades tackling the modernity problem inherited in aesthetics, like that of elitism versus democracy, the fundamental paradox of pedagogic enlightenment. To borrow Elkins’s phrase, it has left arts education simply “too easy,” and problematically has also de-politicized it. Thierry de Duve’s “Joseph Beuys, or the Last of the Proletarians”27 is perhaps the harshest critique of this visionary artist that I know of, for its attack focused on Beuys’s core belief in creativity, thus surpassing even scholar Benjamin Buchloh’s infamous piece “Beuys: The Twlight of the Idol.” Yet his comment on how creativity in the cultural field failed to replace money as “capital” might be another timely reading in light of the creative industries’ craze for manufacturing the boom in art education. For a mockery of what kind of future generation the current Hong Kong education omni-emphasis on creativity will produce, the Mcdull film series hit the bulls-eye again with Mcdull The Alumni (2006).

109 The following quotation from Thierry de Duve, at the close of the Rediscovering Aesthetics conference held in Cork in 2004, despite drawing good-natured laughter (as the transcript records), speaks of something that I wish I could remind people of—the importance of modern aesthetics that is often neglected in contemporary art education:

I’d say with a leap that Kant’s Critique of Judgment formulates a transcendental—I say transcendental, not utopian or anything like that—foundation for democracy and peace on earth.28

Understanding this, I believe, makes contemporary art education not just possible, but also meaningful.

Notes 1 Friedhelm Mennekes, Beuys zu Christus (Stuttgart: Verl. Kath. Bibelwerk, 1992), 48. 2 Note: The staff reconfirmed for me these startling alumni figures, which, however, I still can’t help but be suspicious of. 3 See James Elkins, ed., The New Ph.D. in Studio Art, Printed Project no. 4 (2005). 4 See Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 6. 5 According to the A Study on Creativity Index, commissioned by the Home Affairs Bureau, creative industries are “a group of economic activities that exploit and deploy creativity, skill, and intellectual property to produce and distribute products and services of social and cultural meaning—a production system through which the potentials of wealth generation and job creation are realized.” The domains identified as such include advertising, architecture, art, antiques and crafts, design, digital entertainment, film and video, music, performing arts, publishing, software and computing, television, and radio. 6 James Elkins, “Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction,” Web PDF version, http://www.jameselkins.com/html/books_academic. html, 1. 7 http://va.hkbu.edu.hk/about.htm. 8 http://www.cityu.edu.hk/scm/aboutus/mission.htm. 9 “Standard,” Hong Kong Art School, unpaginated leaflet, undated. 10 “The Art Seminar,” in James Elkins, ed., Art History Versus Aesthetics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 60. 11 See Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism, translated by Caroline Slatzwedel and Mitch Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10. 12 Nichloas Mirzoeff, “What is Visual Culture?” in The Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 1998), 10. 13 Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture—The Study of the Visual after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005),18. 14 James Elkins, “Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction,” 14. 15 James Elkins, “Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction,” 84. 16 See Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996). 17 See Scott Lash, Another Modernity—A Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 18 “Standard,” Hong Kong Art School, unpaginated leaflet, undated. 19 Leung Po Shan, “Writing Backward,” in QK—A Specimen Collection of Chan Yuk Keung (Hong Kong: Para/Site Art Space, 2003), 147. 20 See “Leung Chi Wo,” in Someone Else’s Story—Our Footnotes, Contemporary Art of Hong Kong (1990–1999) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2002), 92. 21 Chan Yuk Keung, “Monologue,” in QK—A Specimen Collection of Chan Yuk Keung, 10. 22 Lane Relyea, “L.A.-Based and Superstructure,” in Howard Singerman, ed., Public Offerings (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 259–58. 23 Howard Singerman, “From My Institution to Yours,” in Public Offerings, 287–66. 24 “Monologue,” 8–11. 25 “Chan Yuk Keung,” in Someone Else’s Story—Our Footnotes, Contemporary Art of Hong Kong (1990–1999), 88. 26 James Elkins, Why Art Cannot be Taught (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 99. 27 See Thierry de Duve, “Joseph Beuys or The Last of the Proletarians,” October 45 (1988), 47–62. 28 “The Art Seminar,” 65.

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