Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Is Hong Kong today more creative than ten years ago




10 years ago marked a sensitive date in HK’s historical timeline. So what was everybody doing in that point of time? Busy building for bigger opportunity to reap profits; busy planning their trips to exit this “place of uncertain future”; busy making films that record the change of sovereignty; busy creating big projects that should encourage the people to stay – say for example the Chek Lap Kok Airport or the world acclaimed Tsing Ma Bridge.

To view things on a retrospect, we were all helping to execute THAT ultra creative project of Mr Deng Xiaoping, termed strategically as “one country, two systems” and praised by all as ingenious and un-precedented.

The overall creativity of the populace, however, has not excelled as a result of this. We do have a lot of happenings or hardware that claimed to be “creative” or to promote “creativity”. And even more so in the rim of “creative industries.”

However, creativity is functionally and fundamentally dependent on the freedom of thinking, the skills of expression plus a longer vision as to where a society, or mankind in general, is heading. To this, I am still awaiting more signals from our next creative generation.

2 comments:

亞照 (ah Chiu ) said...

Comparing creativity?
Creativity comparison?
Problems of Creativity?
Awareness towards creativity?
Such non-ending talks about “creativity” is getting annoying and disgusting. This word “creativity” somehow gets on my nerves and casts shiver over my skin.

10 years ago, it seems that this word “creativity” was basically non-existent among cultural discussions. Could we say that we were not creative at that time? We still lived and enjoyed life and visited shows and cinemas and talked about them as we do nowadays. We still wrote and painted and sang as we do nowadays.

The over-dosage of “creativity” had made it a word that equals “hope”, equals “future” and in some sense equals “love”.

The fact is: we are overwhelmed with fear – particularly the fear of losing. We are no more as bold to talk about ourselves. We are self-censoring. We are not naughty enough. We are not fun enough.

“Creativity” has turned into a curse like the tightening golden ring over Money King’s head!

Popopope said...

I think we still use "creativity" as in artificial intelligence or behavior psychology. Creativity is being looked at as mental exercise, while culture and art are more than just creativity. Culture and art flourish as the good, the bad and the ugly worlds colliding and criticizing, when we are at war with ourselves.