A Piaget Group for Hong Kong: A Relational Model to Define Present Art Practices in Hong Kong

I once wrote that there was nothing inherently “hybrid”, that hybridity is a changing image of things that are in the process of being eventually identified as “native”, since most things come from somewhere else before being seen as belonging to a time and place. But it remains that some things have been seen and felt as inherently “native” for such a long time that they seemed never to have been seen as hybrids. For instance, Chinese painting theory, the one conditioned by literati thinking – itself conditioned by the various forms of “neo-Confucianism” that emerged during the Song and Ming dynasties – was born and developed in China and belonged, for any art historian, squarely to a purely Chinese tradition (although one could always argue that essential parts of Song dynasty neo-Confucian philosophy was profoundly influenced by Buddhism, itself not a “native” Chinese philosophy). In fact, this understanding of hybridity as constantly transforming, never still and impossible to define ontologically, is probably something more clearly belonging to our times of seemingly much faster changes. These changes, very visible at least in the visual arts around the world, are profoundly rooted in the now all-pervasive idea of globalization.