Co-creating Agency, Remaking Worlds: Socially Engaged Participatory Art in Hong Kong and Taiwan

Focusing on socially engaged co-creative participatory art, this thesis expands international scholarship by chronicling exemplary cases from East Asia. In addition to offering contextualised exegeses of contemporary projects from Hong Kong and Taiwan between 2000 and 2018, the thesis responds to questions about the efficacy and democratic potential of participatory art by anchoring the study in the concepts of agency and world-making. Complaints Choir of Hong Kong (2009-2011) and Woofer Ten (2009-2014) demonstrated how co-creative participatory art can be a lens for understanding the city’s multifaceted democratic movement in a critical period bracketed by the eventful years of 2009 and 2014, when a growing civil society exercised agency to tactically remake everyday worlds for transcending realpolitik to live in truth. In democratic Taiwan, Textile Playing Workshop (2000-2004) and Papercut Field: Soulaugh Project (2016-2017) furthered the democratic quest at personal and communal levels by engaging women to reclaim their subjectivity visà-vis repressive patriarchy and, against the grain of pervasive urbanisation/modernisation, assert the value of their rural habitat respectively. Methodologically, the surveyed examples provide an empirical ground for considering the “æffects”—a concept bridging the affect of art with the effect of activism—in socially engaged co-creative participatory art.

Besides examining the making of social engaged co-creative participatory art, the thesis also ruminates on its curating in a self-reflective account of three curatorial undertakings. A trilogy at the destined site of Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District (2011-2013) experimented with cultural democracy. Tin Shui Collaborative (2014) empowered grassroot resistance against disenfranchisement. Hi! Hill—Art in-Situ (2018) engaged locals to delve into pertinent issues of home and custodianship. Curatorial agency crafted spaces for reciprocally enriching creativity and “caring with,” a collective practice put forth in care ethics for redefining democracy. Written in a context whose recent developments are not insular amidst rising authoritarianism in different parts of the world, this socially engaged art history encapsulates the potential of individual agency and world-making co-creativity in a reservoir of hope.