Intra‐Asian Creativity in Hong Kong Education and Activism

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay draws on empirical research from two studies examining creativity, activism, and education in Hong Kong. We use a decolonizing and deimperializing approach to centering creativity as a lever for social change, and demonstrate the ways in which the specifics of culture, region, time, and place uniquely produce forms of creativity, as has long been documented by creativity scholars. We build upon Kuan‐hsing Chen's Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (2010), applying it to creativity and the ways in which we can better attend to cultural and regional differences rather than adhere to universalizing “creative industries” or developmental psychological discourses. Here we are not interested in documenting “non‐western” modes of creativity, in the ways this has sometimes been addressed as local craft or traditional cultural practices. Rather, we advance a theory of intra‐Asian creativity (including Australia) with its own onto‐epistemological legacies and innovations. We celebrate these formations as emergent from and imbricated with conceptual traditions such as Taoism and Western knowledge systems, rejecting binarized individualist “versus” collectivist approaches. The emerging field of critical creativity studies points to the ways in which decolonizing, deimperializing and collaborative research are reorienting our work toward benefit for all, rather than the (white) (western) few.