In this essay and in the two projects discussed, we use a multi-vocal structure to model our commitment to an “intra-Asian” project of decolonization, de-imperialization, and creative critical exchange. We do this by highlighting our author voices as White American-Australian (Daniel X. Harris) and “native HongKonger” (Kelly Ka Lai Chan), engaged in a dialogue within the East Asian region, and by drawing on our two studies which both have sites in Hong Kong. We extend Kuan-hsing Chen's (2010) call to build an inter-Asian conversation that does not ignore “the west” (nor is it possible to do so), but at the same time does not produce for or direct our discourses toward that audience. We also build upon De Cloet, Chow, and Chong's (2019) comparison of intra-Asian to inter-Asian, and their interrogation of the agency of framing Asia (or East Asia) as method. They remind us that “Trans-Asia as Method as a concept was coined and explored by Koichi Iwabuchi in 2004” (De Cloet et al., 2019, p. 2). They – like we here – query the value of understanding “Asia” as a conceptual and empirical move, and wonder how these kinds of enquiries might contribute to scholarly collaboration in creative and cultural industries across (and within) Asia and East Asia in particular.

Our proposal of an “intra-Asian conversation” is one which is internal, within the region, and not between separate, boundaried nation-subjects. We begin that work by unpacking such exhausted concepts as “Asian”, “eastern” “western” and other outmoded binaries, in order to progress toward a more contemporary, nuanced approach to understanding both intra-Asian dialogue, and intra-Asian creativity, with examples from the empirical data of our two separate studies, both based in Hong Kong. By speaking together across racial, ontological, and cultural positionalities, the co-authors invite readers to move beyond commodified and colonized lenses when engaging with the axes of both “creativity” and the “Asian rim”. For the purposes of this essay, we define “western” as systems of thought based in the global north and west, typified by Cartesian dualistic thought and imbued with capitalist ontologies. We draw on two case studies that each examine creativity research in Hong Kong, but from two diverse perspectives.

Perhaps the one facet of contemporary creativity studies most widely recognized is that there is no consistent definition of creativity, but many diverse and totally appropriate working definitions of creativity to suit individual contexts. This is as it should be. In this essay, we draw on Dan's first chapter in The Creative Turn (2014), which spends considerable time mapping the contradictions and unnecessary obsessions with definitions of creativity, and suggests a more situated approach, as well as a need to “decouple” creativity from innovation or commodification in the contemporary context (2014, p. 20). As far back as 1999, Arthur Cropley and others were problematizing the endless and reiterative search for a single “definition” of creativity. From early creativity analyses, Morris Stein drew important connections between the “creative individual” and their cultural context. Deleuze, too, points out that no philosophy of creativity can be considered ahistorically (in Lundy, 2012) or—we would argue—“aculturally”. So for the purposes of this essay, we turn to a workable Asian definition of creativity that can help guide us through the two case studies we present.

Singaporean creativity scholar Ai-Girl Tan has, for more than 20 years, explored creativity in Singapore, primarily through an education and music lens (2000; 2007) looking at ways of fostering creativity in education. More widely and recently across the region, Asian scholars have attended to the ways in which culture shapes understandings, teaching, learning and assessment of creativity in education and beyond (Hsu & Wang, 2019; Leong & Leung, 2013; Sun, Wang, & Wegerif, 2020).

Vlad Glaveanu's The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research (2017) covers wide and diverse approaches to culturally-focused creativity studies, and most recently, Shao, Zhang, Zhou, Gu, and Yuan (2019) survey how culture and creativity intersect in four Chinese studies, with especial variance along individualist versus collectivist approaches to creative processes. The considerable differences they find between “East” and “West” ways of creative thinking and creative doing also deeply impact the veracity of assessment which needs to be culturally appropriate to reflect any accuracy at all. So from these, we take collectivism and individualism as key components of enquiry in intra-Asian creativity, as well as Chen's demand for more multiculturally Asian onto-epistemological approaches.

1 CREATIVITY AS AN IN-BETWEEN SUBJECTIVITY

My (Ka-Lai's) PhD study examines collective and creative responses to the erosion of freedom in my home city, Hong Kong. I was writing and making the study entirely on unceded lands in Naarm/Melbourne during the pandemic in 2020–2022. My positionality has changed from a colonial subject from Hong Kong, a former British colony for over 150 years to a transient migrant colonial beneficiary in Australia.

In 1997, the sovereignty of Hong Kong was handed over to the PRC. Some commentators claim that the “Handover” of Hong Kong was an official end of the (more than) century of humiliation since the Qing Dynasty's defeat in the First Opium War in 1840 (Metcalf, 2020). Modern China, the PRC, was founded in a narrative of victimhood and Hong Kong a source of shame to the world power. Hong Kong is now a Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) with its semi-autonomous governance; however, the Chinese Communist Party has been tightening its grip on Hong Kong over the years. For instance, candidates for Chief Executive of Hong Kong must be approved by the Chinese authority to enter the election by a 1200 people committee. To say Hong Kong is a semi-autonomous region (SAR) is but a political play of words. To use cultural studies scholar Rey Chow's words, Hong Kong is “between colonizers” (1992). In this context, I refer to Hong Kong as a post/colonial city—an in-between subject; in Akbar Abbas' words, “a postcoloniality that precedes decolonization” (1997, p. 6).

Along with research comes a realization of my own subjectivity, an in-betweenness that has informed my arguments of an emergent hybrid subjectivity, which constitutes Hong Kong's creativity—a practice of “using disappearance to deal with disappearance” (Abbas, 1997, p. 8). Hong Kong, as Abbas puts it, is a culture of disappearance. The city's creativity is reflected on the multiple layers of translation having taken place at different stages of “negotiating the mutations and permutations of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism” (Abbas, 1997, p. 11). Its “hybrid” identity and the fixed notion of identity itself are being reinvented and are evolving with constant translation and negotiation required (Abbas, 1997).

2 CREATIVE ECOLOGIES IN EAST ASIA

Since 2014, I (Dan) have been conducting empirical research funded by the Australian Research Council on creativity in “East Asia”, which (due to COVID closures) includes five sites: Hong Kong, Singapore, and the three Australian cities of Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. My research investigates how creativity is understood, practiced and trained for in each of those sites. Given that long-standing research shows how creativity is culturally- and historically-constituted (Serafinelli & Tabellini, 2022), the study takes as its hypothesis then that we may be “doing” creativity in unique ways in our region, a different focus than the universalist creativity discourse/s dominating from the global north and west. The pervasiveness of design thinking, and of cognitive approaches to creativity out of those contexts, for example, may not be shared in other regions, cultures and economies. The study asserts that for a number of reasons including economic, intercultural, and creative, it is beneficial for our region to work more effectively together than stand “shoulder to shoulder” facing the global north and west, playing “catch up” in their (also culturally-specific) creativities.

In 2019, not long before the COVID pandemic hit, and only months before the largest anti-PRC protests began, the project team returned to Hong Kong to devise a performance with local actors. From Chinese opera performers, to festival directors, multi-national tech company managers, university professors, to independent artists, each site was represented by twenty-five interviews and over 150 surveys of university students, providing a cross-sectoral snapshot of the ways in which creativity is considered, articulated, performed, and debated in Hong Kong. Using the interview transcripts, I created a draft verbatim performance text and returned to Hong Kong to work with local actors to develop a 30-minute performance (more detail on this in Harris, 2021).

The performance of “Hong Kong creativity” at a university on that hot day in 2019 was profoundly moving. The audience was made up of some interview participants, some tertiary students and academics, and some members of the public. In addition to the evocative bodies, sounds, and words of the performers were that particular brand of Hong Kong humor, the unique mixture of old and new that is Hong Kong, and the sensory embodiment of Hong Kong's long history as a melting pot and crossroads of and between cultures. Multi-lingual, multi-cultural, ethnically and economically hierarchical. The Filipino home workers that crowd the skywalks on Sundays to visit with each other, the place of British culture and knowledge systems still so thoroughly part of Hong Kong, twenty-six years after “handover”. The precarity of Hong Kong's place as the “gateway” to “Asia”, and anxiety about what else might distinguish it as a place and an identity, amidst the shifting politics and economies of the region. All of this was somehow present in the performance which touched on the uneasy internationalization of the art scene through westward-facing large scale festivals like Art Basel and the West Kowloon Cultural District development, and the squeezing out of venues for independent artists to hone their craft. The ever-present shortage of space in which to live, to work, to make art. The very western “gifted and talented” approach to building creativity in schools, and the “Cambridge system” that still dictates Hong Kong curriculum using British curriculum, and measures academic achievement in school testing.

But beyond all of these traces of Hong Kong life and creativity, this particular performance was laced with nostalgia about the Hong Kong that has been, and which these residents saw as now rapidly being lost, the disappearing Hong Kong that has characterized Ka-Lai's doctoral research. This performance more than any of the other four in this study was able to touch into some of the more inchoate aspects of culturally-specific creativity, or what I've been articulating as a “creative ecology” (Harris, 2016). In my theorization of the term, creativity is always environmentally-emergent, and never individualist. Even the more traditional western measures of creativity as an individual's cognitive capacities risks falsely claiming to extricate how one thinks from their upbringing, biology, enculturation, relationships, environment, and opportunity. So taking a creative ecological approach to understanding Hong Kong's creativity means incorporating all of the sensory instantiations, histories, and cultural contradictions, with its particular moment in time and place. That is, the snapshot created of Hong Kong creativity in those interviews, surveys and performance in 2018–2019 would not be the same now, or five years earlier, or 100 years in the future. Of course not. It seems like a given that the New York City of today is not the same New York of 1850, so why when theorizing creativity in education or industry do we continue to insist on the need for a “consistent” definition of creativity, and standardized measures? Creativity resists such containment, and such persistent demands risk reducing the potentialities and intuitive aspects (Chang, 2011) inherent in creativity and creative doings to an unnecessarily narrow and emaciated window.

The complexity of this study raises a number of intersecting questions: is it appropriate or even possible for a white, western outsider to try to assess the kinds of creativity that are emergent in sites like Hong Kong; is it useful to use umbrella terms like “East Asia” and make decisions about which countries are included in that; what constitutes a “legitimate” sample of measurement or ethnographic immersion in such an enquiry; what is the best way to bring together Asian and non-Asian views on creativity and creative education, given the significant onto-epistemological and cultural differences in how we see, structure and move in the world?

Of course, I'm not the first white western person to research in and about Asia. But the ethics of de-imperialization that Chen and others demand, requires us all to share in the labor of de-colonization and de-imperialization, both through listening and discussion, as well as by acknowledging the considerable and different work required of Asian and other colonized peoples on this road to decolonization of minds. Experiencing Hong Kong alongside Ka-Lai was a privilege and, as always when having a local interlocutor, I saw and understood many aspects of Hong Kong that I would not have on my own. At the same time, I understood from some of our conversations then and since then how Hong Kong itself (as with so many other sites) is so intersectional that it is increasingly obsolete to think of it as “Asian” or “Western” at all. Hong Kong is, and has been for centuries, a place of both/and, and since 1842, interlaced with British white colonization and cultural intermingling. And yet.

Is it even useful or possible to speak of ‘culture’ anymore (Harris, 2014)? The answer, as I see it, is both yes and no. No when it's used for essentializing purposes; yes when it helps to understand enculturation differences, worldviews, and belonging. We are not all the same. It is also helpful when we seek to look honestly at inequity, racism, sexism, and class as expressed through geopolitical tensions, alliances and conflicts. In the next section, we unpack the notion of “intra-Asian creativity”, building on Chen's call to look between countries in (and within) our region, rather than so persistently outward. In the case of Hong Kong, we ask the question “How can Hong Kong creativity itself represent a kind of ‘intra-Asian creativity’”, given that it is such a crossroads for other Asian nationals, cultures and flows?

One example is the prevalence of migrant workers in Hong Kong, embodying hierarchies of gender, nationality, and class. Walking around the city on Sundays, Ka-Lai helped me understand the crowds of workers gathered on the walkways visiting with friends and family on their only days off, and how this public gathering was disruptive for the middle class Hong Kongers. The creativity these guest workers constantly deploy in maintaining their lives, communicating with their distant families, and finding meaning and wellbeing in difficult circumstances, is just one particular kind of “Hong Kong creativity” to which we could attend. As Chen has noted, many countries (and populations within) have been both “colonizer and colonized” (2010, p. 10). On the other end of the spectrum is the increasingly corporatized visual arts scene that draws tens of thousands of creatives from around the world each year, but alienates many local emergent or political artists. There are countless expressions of Hong Kong creativity. So how to explore it without essentializing or seeking to offer a static “representation” that risks inaccuracy? The term “intra-Asian creativity” is one way in.

3 INTRODUCING A NOTION OF “INTRA-ASIAN CREATIVITY”

Before introducing the notion of intra-Asian creativity, let us first establish definitions of decolonization and deimperialization. Chen defines decolonizing as the process through which previous colonial powers (occupiers) dismantle the formal structures of colonization (withdrawal, a move to self-rule etc), but also the individual and collective process by the formerly-occupied, of disentangling occupied mindsets, habits, economies and local ecologies and relations (a process not as cut-and-dried). Following the initial formal stages of decolonization, however, a period of imperialism emerges in which the former colonizers still exert control as imperial powers, to which “the independent states are still prey” (Chen, 2010, p. 18). That is, even after de-occupation, the colonizing powers do not simply withdraw or disappear from the formerly-occupied peoples and regions. Such is the complex and ongoing histories of East Asian countries, as this decolonizing/deimperializing process is repeatedly re-enacted throughout multiple cycles of different occupiers and varying degrees of “independence”. By helping readers think through the ongoing and interrelated processes of decolonization and deimperialization, Chen draws attention to the longer-term project of independence and economic autonomy. So what does all this have to do with creativity?

Discussions of creativity in ethnically diverse spaces demand attention to race and colorism, in addition to geopolitical and cultural regional differences. Why? The vulnerability required to enter into creative thinking, flow, and activity demands safety both internally and interpersonally. Without it, the space for creative emergence is short-circuited, whether that is in formal collaborations, improvizations, or sharing of creative works. In the rehearsals of the creativity study performance in Hong Kong, Dan had to be vulnerable and prioritize listening as white, foreign playwright and co-performer, had to establish collaborative trust with the local performers, and had to attend to both difference and sameness in communicating with the actors and the audience. The local actors too brought vulnerability and generosity in sharing their own experiences of race, culture, and creativity in their home city. These cross-cultural dialogues through collaboration necessitated honest discussion about race, gender, culture, power, and colonization, and they are not always easy. Ka-Lai too had to bring vulnerability in her work with the artist-activists in her study. While they share “Hong Kongness”, the artists were, in some cases, living more precarious lives during the protests that characterized this time, some were migrating out of Hong Kong for their own safety and creative freedom, and Ka-Lai often felt a degree of outsiderness as a resident of Australia.

Anthropologist and Japanologist Dorinne Kondo highlights the complexities of cross- and inter-racial theater casting in her examination of Anna Deavere Smith and David Henry Hwang's American theater works. She explores the difficulties of cross-racial representation, throw-backs to “yellow face” in portraying Asian characters, and the complexity for even other people of color in seeking to move away from representational evocations (2018; 2019). As Kondo points out, theater is a particularly rich space for exploring the emotion and vulnerability of creativity. It is a context and set of practices that pivot on those two emotions, and one that is inherently collaborative. Kondo juxtaposes this space of respectful dialogue and collaboration with the modus operandi of academic contexts, which is “based on debate and the performance of impenetrability” (Kondo, 2018, p. 181). Both Ka-Lai and Dan's studies are interested in the ways in which creatives from a range of ethnicities, practices and nationalities navigate these considerations, from different discourses to distinct cultural practice foundations of their creative work. By attending to these and other potential pitfalls, a respectful and non-representational “intra-Asian creativity” is able to emerge. But it's not simply the nuanced questions researchers working in these areas must address; we must continue to ask the most basic questions as well. We start with what do we mean when we say “Asia”—a question that is not only regionally specific, but has fluid temporal-historical meanings as well.

In Asia as Method in Education Studies (2015), white Australian scholar Jane Kenway asks “What is Asia?” (p. 15) and draws on Chen's theorization to move beyond accepted definitions or constructs. Kenway et al apply Chen's onto-epistemological approach to the notion of ‘Asia’ to the field of Education Studies. Dan's study sets out to apply Chen's conceptual framework to creativity in Education Studies, and Ka-Lai's work applies Chen to artist-activists. Kenway asks “Are Australia and New Zealand part of Asia?” (p. 16) and our work in the studies presented in this essay answers that question in the affirmative, while recognizing the diversities present.

For Chen, several countries in the East Asian region are “in the process of creating their own relationship with the concept of Asia” (2010, p. 214). Now, 13 years on, where does the region stand in relation to creativity and creatively reimagining Asia as a concept? Remember that Chen's call and his title is Asia as Method, and we attune to the fact that a method is a doing, an action, and ongoing effort and process. Chen's contribution is no simple conceptual trickery or utopian dream; rather, he invokes the broad brush strokes of history to invite us into his project as a future-focused program of activity. De-imperialization is an arduous, active, and ongoing process. As such, it means that any intra-Asian creativity is also an emergent, and sometimes mercurial, project, as it is elsewhere around the globe.

Chen also stresses that colonization and imperialism are not limited to domination by the west alone, as for Taiwan and other East Asian countries (think Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea) their colonizers have included China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan as well, highlighting once again the need to reject simplistic binaries of “east” and “west”, “colonial” and “post-colonial” or even, in some cases, colonized/colonizer. With such complicated histories and multicultural presents, intra-Asian creativity is inherently a hybrid process involving synthesis, a core component of any creative process, as well as a critical reflexivity evolving from its geo-political past.

Intra-Asian creativity does not rely on western creativity discourses or industries, but it remains in conversation with them. Chen, like Chang, also makes the point that, while capitalism and globalization now predominate, they intersect with older systems of creative experience like Tao, and reflect and incorporate the scars of dominance and submission present in colonization and imperialism (Chen, 2010, p. 4). Dominant western creativity discourses are one example of this contemporary globalization of markets and discourses, including concepts like “design thinking” “creative industries” and “giftedness” or “talent development”, but they are not alone. Chen stresses the need for discarding such dualisms by introducing the concept of a critical syncretism in blending these multiple and threaded traditions, and discarding a colonial identification so imbued with dualisms. Therefore, we claim that any intra-Asian creativity is critically syncretist, reflecting the strength of and need for a threading of different traditions and perspectives.

4 CONCLUSION

In this essay, we suggest how an articulation of intra-Asian creativity can be an activation of Chen's call for Asia as Method in creativity studies. Through our two empirical examples, we demonstrate the multiplicity of Hong Kong ways of seeing, thinking, doing, and articulating creativity. We have sought to unpack some examples of the three core components we gather form a (not “the” but “a”) basis of intra-Asian creativity: hybridity, collectivism versus individualism, and critical syncretism.

These multiplicities are simultaneously self-referential and outward-facing. They are easternwestern and they are regional and they are global, all at once. Creative thought and innovation depends upon these kinds of multiplicities, and in this way the region of East Asia (and Hong Kong specifically) is particularly well-situated to be a global leader in creativity in the 21st century. The multi-ethnic and political history and present of Hong Kong creates the conditions for Chen's call to “multiply frames of reference in our subjectivity and worldview, so that our anxiety over the West can be diluted and productive and critical work can move forward” (2010, p. 223). By refusing an outdated dualistic “west and the rest” worldview, we invite readers to recognize the culturally interwoven nature of contemporary culture, scholarly thought and creative studies research and practice. Lastly, we challenge ourselves and our white and non-white readers to do our own decolonizing and deimperializing work in our thought-making and practice-doing, and to make more space for non-white, non-western creativities.

5 CONFLICT OF INTEREST

We have no conflict of interest.

6 ETHICS STATEMENT

University human ethics approval was granted for Harris' study under RMIT University's Human Ethics board, approval #CHEAN B 21046-08/17. University human ethics approval was granted for Kelly Chan's study under RMIT University's Human Ethics board, approval #CHEAN A 22287-06/19.