Creativity, color and communities: re-creating the city across the borders

The varied forms of urban creativity (e.g. street art, contemporary graffiti, guerrilla gardening) started to emerge in East Asian cities since the end of 1980s. The growing urbanization in East Asian cities, the continuous socio-political changes and the global trends in alternative art practices have led to the rise of new forms, needs, and sites for visual self-expression in urban public space. Novel strategies and aesthetics are continuously developed because of the growing urge of artists and urbanites to re-imagining the city through art and creativity. As a result, the forms of urban creativity are not merely reflecting the changes of the city and urban policies but they are actively reshaping the cityscapes. In turn, the multileveled reciprocal relationship between the city and urban creativity also modifies the styles, forms and aesthetics on the streets.

Through contextualized, aesthetic and site-responsive analysis, this paper examines the visual references, agencies and impact of artistic and creative practices that emerged to support the Occupy Central with Love and Peace Movement (known also as Umbrella Movement/ Umbrella Revolution) in Hong Kong in September 2014. By bringing into a dialogue two main perspectives – studies of specificity of Hong Kong art (Clarke 2001, Vigneron 2010)  and on social movements and political participation in Hong Kong (Cheng ed. 2014, Lam 2004) – the aim is to shed light on the particularity of aesthetic manifestations in relation to both indigenous and transcultural features.

Waves of creativity by urbanites have swept across Hong Kong twice before the Occupy Central: first, as a reaction to Tian’anmen Incident in 1989 and second, in support to contemporary Chinese artist Ai Weiwei when he was arrested in 2011. However, creativity for the Occupy Movement clearly exceeded the two previous occasions in terms of variety, amount, intensiveness, forms of agencies and duration: from small children to retired elders, urbanites who have never created anything on the streets were supporting the Movement with innovative activities in urban public space. In spite of transcultural implications, I posit that the artistic and creative practices related to Occupy Movement were interdependent to the socio-political and cultural contexts of Hong Kong and they could not have emerged anywhere else with the same forms and visual references. The inventive engagement with the yellow colour and the shape and materials of  an umbrella resulted in many indigenous visual manifestations that caught the interest of the global media to spread the message. The shared visual signs clearly strengthened solidarity and recognition while the use of yellow umbrellas distinguishes the movement and its aim from others around the globe through aesthetic language that will not be easily forgotten.

Keywords: site responsiveness, urban creativity, aesthetics, spatial politics

Inline image © Minna Valjakka

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