FT.com / World Reports / Hong Kong 2005 - Culture: Search for a post-colonial artistic identity

Culture: Search for a post-colonial artistic identity
By Ken Smith
Published: September 19 2005 16:53 | Last updated: September 19 2005 16:53
Almost a year ago, the conductor Edo de Waart, a 40-year veteran of high-profile musical posts spanning three continents, took the reins of the troubled Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. Developing the orchestra’s musicianship, he had said, was only part of the allure.
After witnessing the decline in both state arts funding in Europe and private funding in the US, de Waart saw in Hong Kong the potential for creating a cultural model.
After the initial fanfare, however, the troubles began to roll. Though its playing noticeably improved, the Philharmonic often faced half-empty halls. Chinese critics levelled racially charged invective against the Dutch-born de Waart. And the outspoken conductor, who had relocated his family to Hong Kong, did little to win friends among the local business community, criticising public support for the controversial West Kowloon Cultural District, a proposed multi-billion-dollar arts complex, while funding for arts groups themselves was being cut.
His suggestions about changing the territory’s famous flat tax structure were likened in a local English-language daily to having Hong Kong’s financial secretary suggest faster tempos for the orchestra to attract bigger audiences.
But these days, as the Philharmonic opens its second season with de Waart at the helm, the orchestra has seen a remarkable turnaround, with advance ticket sales up 74 per cent. “Clearly, audiences here didn’t know who Edo was,” says Timothy Calnin, the Philharmonic’s executive director. “It took them a whole season to be convinced.”
Likewise, it took Calnin, who came to the orchestra last season from Sydney, a full year to crack the code of Hong Kong cultural politics. Although the territory is frequently dismissed as a “cultural desert”, its residents branded “capitalist philistines”, the reality at street level is more complex. The issue is not so much “no culture” as it is “which culture”. For every familiar complaint about taxpayers subsidising tickets for an elite few, there is a distinctly local rejection of Eurocentric art as vestiges of a colonial past.
At a time when professional presenters struggle to fill seats even as amateur Cantonese opera performances sell out the house, those trying to grasp Hong Kong’s search for a post-colonial identity need look no further than the local stages.
Philharmonic audiences may indeed be warming to de Waart, but Mr Calnin also admits that much of the orchestra’s turnaround has come after making a particularly close study of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra and the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, two competing ensembles whose programming and marketing have cultivated a distinctively local appeal in both style and substance.
The HKCO, an ensemble of traditional Chinese instruments gathered in a faux-western symphonic array, has largely eschewed the usual overblown folk song repertory and pop concert approach of its genre to aggressively commission serious concert works showcasing its distinctive instrumentation.


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The Sinfonietta, whose members’ average age is under 30, has been a platform for young Chinese soloists and composers since its inception in the early 1990s. Under its photogenic female music director Yip Wing-sie, a one-time protégé of Seiji Ozawa whose near-celebrity media status in Hong Kong perfectly balances professional efficiency with motherly encouragement, the Sinfonietta has carefully cultivated its audience through a popular educational series as well as more adventurous multimedia collaborations with other local performing arts groups.
This season, the Philharmonic features more Chinese soloists, as well as a collaboration in late October with Hong Kong’s City Contemporary Dance Company. It also shares an even closer affinity with its competition, namely substantial budget cuts that were initiated during the peak of the Hong Kong’s financial woes in 2001.
This year’s 4.35 per cent cut brings the Sinfonietta’s share down to a paltry HK$10.7m, as opposed to the Philharmonic’s HK$59m and the Chinese Orchestra’s HK$50.3m. “Supporting the city’s cultural life has not been high on the public agenda,” says Mr Calnin. Hong Kong’s policies toward the arts contrast starkly with nearby Macau, the former Portuguese colony and current Asian casino capital, whose local government still fully funds its spring and autumn festivals.
“In Macau, the arts are considered a door to the outside world,” says Warren Mok, artistic director of the Macau International Music Festival since the colony’s return to China in 1999. “For the residents, these events are truly local.”
But when Mok, an operatic tenor and impresario, later conceived Opera Hong Kong in 2003 as the territory’s first professional opera company, he was initially denied government funding, which spurred him in search of private support.
“If I’d waited for government sponsorship, it would’ve taken 100 years,” says Mok, whose inaugural concert was sponsored by Residence Bel-Air, a luxury housing development. His production this autumn is the first to receive public funding: a joint presentation with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of Puccini’s Turandot, directed by Ng See-yuen, the veteran martial arts filmmaker who put Jackie Chan on the map. It is just this combination of public and private support that cultural leaders such as de Waart see as not only emblematic to Hong Kong but important for the survival of the arts in the west.
The Hong Kong Arts Festival, which presents top international acts and encourages local groups to experiment, receives nearly 50 per cent of its budget from a combination of government and private funding – enough to consider artistic merit rather than strictly commercial value, says Douglas Gautier, executive director, but not enough that they can afford to ignore the audience. “Whether you think of it as cultural tourism, or added value to your creative sector, the arts play an important part,” says Mr Gautier, who has leveraged Hong Kong’s proximity to China and familiarity with international standards to represent both.
Last year’s Arts Festival featured eight commissions, he says, including Amber by the China National Theatre and The Nightingale by the London-based Yellow Earth Theatre, which premiered last spring in Hong Kong and is touring the UK this autumn. “For a long time, we were presenting many European acts but sending very few of our acts to Europe,” Mr Gautier says. “I started telling people, if you really have a serious commitment to this region then you should be presenting some of our artists.”
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