When Contemporary Art Meets Creativity: Creative Industries, Global Capital and Art Labour in H

This thesis examines the discourse on creativity emerged at the turn of the millennium as a phenomenon in the post-industrial regions. It treats human as a resource and takes city to branding in order to enhance competition among cities and individuals in the global economy. The discourse on creativity highlights freedom, playfulness and equal participation of each individual but neglect its negative effects on labour. It normalizes flexible labour, encourages entrepreneurialization of the self and widens the gap between the global talents and the local labour. In short the discourse is a catalyser of neo-liberalism. However, existing studies on creativity including quantitative accounts of its economic effects and theoretical critique, both fall short in capturing the labour experience and their individual agency within the given structural constrains. These studies also cannot explain the context of different regions and the reason why and how art worker would subscribe to the discourse. Through my three-year field work in Hong Kong, I try to explain how the notion of creativity transforms the composition of the contemporary art field. The ethnography is an in-depth description of how the art labour respond to the challenges to their local network and knowledge, as well as how the discourse impose an industrial logic into cultural works. The thesis would investigate if the arts fields and the industry are set to be in a perpetual conflict or they are can produce mutual benefit to each other. The detailed description will not only show the collectivity, the materiality, the mundane and the procedural nature of art production, but also put individual agency at the forefront, that is often absent from the structural analysis and critique to the creative industries. I will explain how these individuals and collective of the art labour mobilize their cultural and social capital in a Bourdieuian sense, as well as how they interact with the social life of art objects; in order to increase their bargaining power in the labour market and social mobility.