Community engagement through the arts: A Hong Kong collaborative project

Hong Kong prides itself as Asia’s world city, recently launching the ambitious US$3 billion cultural and arts hub project—the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD). Its frantic pace of life is not graced with a strong level of interest in and knowledge of the arts. Indeed, there are prevailing misconceptions that the arts are unimportant, have little or no social value to the community, and that they belong exclusively to the elites and privileged few who have much free time on their hands. This paper discusses the planning, acting, observing and reflecting components of a community engagement project that was initiated to address the need to engage the Hong Kong community in the arts. This was a community partnership that comprised six sectors—the higher education sector, commercial sector, school sector, arts sector, media sector, and the general public. This successful collaborative mobile arts project resulted in the arts being brought into the community, reaching out to millions of people over a six-month period. This project adopted an action research approach involving the cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (cf. Lewin). This paper starts with the presentation of existing issues of the lack of community engagement in the arts in Hong Kong and the visions of the project, followed by the methods employed to realize those visions and a concise description of the actual “action.” The paper concludes with an evaluation and reflection of the project, which serves to inform the planning and implementing for the next season of the project to establish a sustainable community arts engagement project. Copyright © 2013 Common Ground, Samuel Leong, Josephine Do.