What Hong Kong’s culture officials can learn from a banana on a wall
The city’s evolving and intriguing pop culture can be a great source of soft power if its creative economy is developed from the grass-roots
Perhaps this is all too easily dismissed as a lighthearted human-interest story with somewhat ridiculous overtones, but there are indeed serious observations to be drawn from these events. Hong Kong’s policymakers and civic leaders who are under pressure to develop the economic potential of the city’s cultural appeal should take note.
The point is that art and popular culture – even the most abstract, ambiguous or absurd – have the potential to cut through news cycles and the torrent of human conflict and misery that comes with them, to generate a softer but nevertheless powerful type of human curiosity.