I believe that art is composed of two major components: instinct and culture, whereas instinct equips individual with automatic response mechanism such as fear, anger, joy, desire… to face daily challenges; and culture embraces those individual responses into a collective belief of a group of people, distilled and accumulated through time, becomes the cultural identity of a group of people in a given place.
The real and variables in “Instinct” and the sedimentation and tolerance of “Culture” can confront or compliment to each other, the phenomena of art in different cultures actually somehow rely on balances and preferences between the two.
Seeing paradigm shift of “art as individual expression” to the recent development that more artists consider themselves as stakeholder of a civil society, art becomes a method rather than a set of tangible form or technique, in this connection, I truly believe art can change the world.
Prof. CHAN Yuk-keung Kurt
Adjunct Professor, The Fine Arts Department, CUHK
