You can search for more information about this online, but it's really terrible for the people who have lived in that village for their whole lives, particularly the elderly. I'm not enthusiastic about how some opportunistic pro-democracy activists and politicians have piggybacked on this, but the fact remains that these people need some kind of support.
If you're in Hong Kong, please go and have fun! The festival starts at 1 pm on both days and will continue till about 10.
Planting Carrots in the Sand: Establishing a West-Kowloon artistic festival at in-the-process-of-being-demolished Choi Yuen Village
The demolition work at Choi Yuen Village continues. Why was a community that was functioning just fine, and where a handful of villagers still continue to live in being destroyed? How can the arts help provoke people to rethink about our way of living?
Hong Kong has often been thought of as a “cultural desert” – a city that is cold and impersonal. But we can also think of the desert as a living entity, and our creative impulses as the small creatures who scurry quietly around. Just because we are not big and in-your-face does not mean we do not exist! The problem with our cultural environment is that, just like in a desert, the soil has been lacking nourishment. But our urge to create remains, alive and pulsing.
For the past two years, creativity and artistic expression has been entwined with the campaign to save Choi Yuen village. Young people have painted flowers along the village paths and hosted concerts such as “Embrace: A Choi Yuen Village Musical Festival.” Photographers have decorated houses with huge, on-site installation. Throughout the village, this flowering of artistic expression has given encouragement and voice to the hopes of the villagers. And now, this moment, they need our support more than ever.
We can forsee the danger of local artists being ignored by the proposed West Kowloon Cultural enterprise. Thus, this festival of “Planting Carrots in the Sand” is also a statement by local artists towards the planning of West Kowloon. In this unprecedented communal creation, we are calling for artists to gather at the wasteland of Choi Yuen village to bear witness to this moment of our history. We plan to record and publish this happening through text and images for future generations, and as an ode to creativity in a commercial world.
We would like to invite artists of different mediums (music, theatre, literature, dance, photographers, video-artists, installation artists, etc) on the third and fourth days of the Lunar New Year (5-6 February, 2011; Sat-Sun) to install themselves in all the different corners of the village to give voice to those who in community who need our support.
To pursue creative work in Hong Kong is like planting carrots in the sand. Artists already spend a lot of effort working with soil that lacks nourishment. If we don’t nourish local art, or even handle our carrots roughly with bureaucratic systems, in the end we will have no harvest.
“Art exists not to be preserved in museums and exhibitions, but in people’s spirit and memories. Only then, does art have meaning.” :)
