Some random thoughts on Art

The recent Art HK 10 has rekindled my long dormant interest in "Art" although I have never really left it completely for long. Owing to the pressures of having to support a family with two daughters one of whom is in college and another about to enter college some time next year, I never really have that much time for art. The self-imposed project of starting a blog since the death of my mother last year has cut down still further what little time I have for devoting more of it to learning more about this fascinating pursuit.

In the comments which I saw in the blog of one of my fellow bloggers, it seems to me that to many, art is something really incomprehensible, and so-called non-realistic contemporary art  particularly so. In such a highly competitive society as Hong Kong, art seems only a completely "non-productive" pastime of those with nothing better to do and which the ordinary folks can scarcely afford. If their children should one day come up to them and tell them, "Dad/Mom, I'd really like to go into an art school. I like to be an artist. It'd be fun. Yes, I think that's what I'd like to do when I grow up. " or some words to similar effect, I am quite sure, most parents would out of concern for their children say something along the following lines", "Johnny/Marianne darling, it's all very nice if from time to time, you splash some ink on a piece of canvas, put some putty into an oven and take out some interesting shapes or other from it and get some "wows" from your friends and relatives, but it's a completely different story if you want to make a living out of it. Believe me, I'm only saying it for you own good. It is extremely difficult to be an artist and be able to pay for the mortgage on your house or the instalment payment of your car" and then would probably go on to give them some  horror stories about how such and such an artist starved to death, ended up in a mental asylum and that the only people who got rich were the art merchants after they're dead. . I would not say that they would be wrong, as parents. There's probably a great deal of wisdom in what they are saying. But at the same time, it also speaks to me of a huge lacuna in the education system here from the 1950's on. It was an education system geared entirely for the production of civil servants and professionals required for our commerce, finance, trade, industry (now gone),construction and health and little else. True we now have purely "notional" art departments in our universities and a school of performing arts. I do not think that the university art departments would have 1/10 th the number of students of say the economics. finance/accounting or department. At most, art would be one of the optional "credit subjects"  in a Communications course. We don't even have a decent publicly funded Art School for training visual artists for a city of about 7 million! What does that tell us of our values?

Yet there can be hardly any doubt that art does play an enormously important role in making us more than just money making and mass market products-consuming automatons. Art make our life more interesting. Just imagine a Hong Kong without artists, many of whom are indirectly involved in producing all those innovative advertising images we see everywhere we go, on the MTR walls, inside the trains, on the monitors outside some of our buildings and in the newspapers, magazines etc. There are sculptures outside or inside the better shopping malls or commercial buildings, churches, town halls, public gardens. Art works appear on the stages of TV spectacles, stage plays, dance performances. Paintings or imitation painting or sculptures decorate the better offices and not a few homes etc. Art pervades our lives, though we seldom realize it. Artists are the people who make this possible.

What does art do? Apart from adding some decorative elements to our daily lives and make them a bit "non-routine", less monotonous and more colorful, the better art makes us look "at" our world as it actually "appears" to our eyes, and not "through" them for the kind of work various objects "do" for us. They make us pay attention to their form, their texture, their feel, through enhancement, often through exaggeration, through juxtapositioning, sometimes even through the shock and violence of  extreme contrasts and incongruities. Less dramatically, they work through parallels, through analogies, through turning them into multivalent symbols or in appropriate cases, through icons. Through adjustment of their size (extremely large or extremely small), through their roughness, sharpness, smoothness, delicacy, through manipulation of their lines, their colours, their shades, their convexity, their concavity and through other forms of play of light, of adjustment or complete bouleversement of our usual or habitual "perspectives", the artists make us "see" the world and the objects in it for what they are, sometimes, as if for the very first time. They inspire in us that sense of wonder, of awe, of surprise or even of terror or of dread or shock and through them, our sense of admiration.  In some ways, the kind of feelings art inspires in us is extremely close to the kind of feelings which some would call "religious". It restores to us that sense of the "sacredness", of "holiness" of the things in this world. It restores to us a little of the magic of the world, as if we were looking at it again, through the eyes of a child: a world of full of enigma, mystery and of magic.It restores to the objects their dignity to exist independently of us, in their own special splendor. It compels us to work in accordance with its laws and not against them. It re-enchants that world for us. That to me is the value of art.