Avant-garde Art Discourse in Hong Kong’s Modernist Art and Literary Publications in the 1950s and 1960s

This essay intents to look into the discussion of avant-garde art in several representative modernist art and literary publications in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s. It focuses on how avant-garde art was accepted within the local framework of Hong Kong, and how local art and literary publications used avant-garde art to reflect on issues such as politics, tradition and modernity. The writer discovers that “avant-garde art” was understood as emerging, formally-experimental and abstract art schools such as Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstract Art. When introducing western avant-garde artists, the majority of the critics used western art terminologies while, without exception, they used oriental aesthetic terminologies when discussing abstract art in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Such a difference could be attributed to the advocation by art and culture practitioners who encouraged abstract artists in the 50s and 60s to achieve oriental aesthetic values, such as “non-self,” “self/ego,” “rule of no rule as the supreme rule,” “take no action,” “beyond the real and unreal,” with western methods. By putting the publication of the discussed titles in the context of the society, the artists involved in introducing avant-garde art to Hong Kong had never regarded art as purely formalistic. Avant-garde to them was a tool for art and literature to respond to political reality and Chinese cultural re-engineering.