Student/ Herman:
I am Herman Ho. I’m from 2016 Creative Playground project. I’d like to introduce to you Professor Li Siu Leung, from the HK Academy for Performing Arts. Art education.
Art education, the art of education. Educating art, learning art, teaching art, cultivating art. Art education, the art of education. A need for art in education, a need for education in art. Art is education, education is art.
Please.

Woo:
Please. Please feel free to select your seat.

Li Siu Leung:
This is like the podium. Yes. Thank you, Danny, my old friend. I started watching Zuni’s production in the 80’s. Just now, I listened to the speeches, and I felt the playfulness of Zuni’s Danny Yung and Mathias Woo. They pretend to be playing, but in fact, they are very serious. Now let me try to be really playful. I have been working in the APA for only 4 months, so this really can’t represent what I did in the past 20 years.
I taught in the Department of Cultural Studies of Lingnan University for 17 years, and before that, I taught in the HKUST for 3 years.I went to the USA for 2 years for a post-doctoral programmme, and previous to that, I studied for a PhD programme there. Going back further, I was born in Hong Kong, and was educated here.
Today, I will illustrate with 2 examples the co-relation between experience, social interaction, social intervention and education… Well, they are not that related. Actually, I don’t know how to teach people to educate.
Teaching has been part of my work all along, but I do not research into education.
So, I’ll share with you my experience, with reference to that in my cultural studies.
My experience in the cultural studies went opposite to that of the Hong Kong APA.
Now I’m working in the School of Chinese Opera. Currently, the School is rather uncreative. Learning the traditional elements takes time, and you can only learn the bare basics in 7 or 8 years. As such, how can we be creative? I find the School of Modern Dances, especially the modern dance programme, very creative. It’s very creative, and especially the modern dance students, they are very creative. Also the School of Drama is creative. Now I endeavor to make the School of Chinese Opera creative. I myself am not a creative person. I was a very good student in terms of behaviour. But my academic performance was not very good. How could an obedient child be creative? I learnt to play Western music. I didn’t compose music myself but played the work of other people.
Now I’ll talk about creativity, social intervention and education. Teaching in the universities of HK is ironic. Who cares about teaching in the universities in Hong Kong? What’s most important is to have international referral general publications.
With these, you will get promotion, contract renewals and tenure. In the past 5 to 7 years, I have spent more and more time on students. I’m proud of it. Before I left Lingnan University, I could talk to students for 7 hours non-stop about their problems. I feel guilty that I only focused on publishing books when I was younger.
And now in the School of Chinese Opera, I very much care for the students, and I encourage them to be more creative. I’d like to give you 2 examples.
One happened before the Umbrella Movement. In the past 5 years, in the School of Cultural studies of Lingnan University, we started to do more performance studies. I think that it is a special branch of cultural studies. It uses the various theories of cultural studies to talk about the different areas of performance of everyday life, including performing arts, ritual performance, political performance, gender performance and so on. In the past 5 years, we developed performance studies and it served as a bridge for me to join the APA.
Before the Umbrella Movement, we had performance classes. The assignments I gave the students were not hard-core academic thesis. If they want to write academic thesis, they can do so. They can do various academic performances. I discuss with them what performance to put on. There are students who are very socially conscious and political. I was more scared about their idea of running on Nathan Road than they were. I said to them, “On Nathan Road, if you are questioned by the police, what can you do? It’s better to perform on campus.” I’m conservative.
If the performance was on campus, it didn’t matter what they did anymore. On campus, they would videotape the performance to present as assignments. The most wonderful part was that there were security guards interrogating the students. There were male and female guards, and they asked what they were doing. They shot for a long time. Then a senior guard who wore a tie came. This is an experience where the students intervened in society. But as a professor, I’m conservative. I asked them not to take to the street, because I worried that they would be arrested, and I wouldn’t know what to do. So, they worked out something for performance studies.
17 years ago, I started to work in Lingnan University and established the School of Cultural Studies. At the time, we discussed and designed the curriculum. When working out the mission statement, terms like “political intervention” or “change the society” never came up. To change the society, please watch “Death Note”, “L: Change the World”. Our mission statement was very official, and contained terms like “creativity” and “independent thinking”. 17 years later, in 2007, there was the preservation movements such as those involving Wedding Card Street, the Star Ferry Pier and so on. I was not on the frontline but I participated a little bit. Oh! Those were the students of the cultural studies programme, some were graduates, some had not graduated yet. Some were in the master programme and also the colleagues…
Starting from 2007, at the time of the Wedding Card Street incident, I was the department head. If my memory serves me well, 9 of my students were arrested by the police. The South China Morning Post reported on it. The students were stripped for a body search. They marched to the government headquarters in protest. Some students came to see me, and given my position, I couldn’t refuse, and I couldn’t refrain from going there. At the protest, a student asked me to say something to all the people gathered at the government headquarters. Well, I should have staged a play. Danny, right? Facing all the students, I could not refuse to speak, so I spoke. Then I acted out my role of a professor, and readily quoted Nietzsche, “That which does not kill us make us stronger.”

So, what is education, if education is not social intervention or public participation?
Or if it’s not about public participation in education, but our participation in public affairs? By participating in public movements, we are not attempting to change an unjust society to a less unjust society. This saying is a cliche, which I have copied from someone else. I won’t say that we want to turn an unfair society into a fair one.
It’s simply impossible. I am just trying to change a very unfair society to a society which is less unfair. This is just an example.
We are not consciously doing creative education or social intervention. But given the cross-disciplinary nature of cultural studies, we taught Marxism, Foucault and so on, so some students were naturally doing all these. In the class, we never asked them not to protest, we never said that. At the time of the Umbrella Movement, this experience was very meaningful. At that time, I didn’t ask the students to go on strike. In that semester, my course started at 9:30am. There were very few students around. I didn't know whether they were sleeping or whether they were taking part in occupying. What’s interesting is that some students arrived at 9:30 looking half-asleep, then they dozed off again after they took their seats. It’s turned out that they had slept in Admiralty the previous night and rushed back to the class early in the morning. I think some youths may not think about themselves from a very theoretical perspective. As a student, do I want to attend the class? So, they slept in Admiralty and then they came back to sleep in the class. I was really touched, and thought that they should not have come. When we teach, there is connection to the society, and then in Lingnan University, we introduced performance studies. All these accumulate to a manifestation that, because of our social intervention, we are under the surveillance of the society. There are surveillance cameras and there are security guards everywhere. What can we do to break the current mechanism, establishment and all the restrictions on us? This point is related to creativity, for creativity is about breaking established things. In this sense, Chinese opera is tricky, as you have to conform to all the rules, without room for even a small bit of deviation. You have to be excellent before you can talk about creativity. Our School will make our best efforts.
Now I’ll talk about the video we’ve just seen and the long-term activity of this project. There are 6 elements, and one of them is structure. Just now, the creative youth introduced me. You were actually dismantling the structure. It is not deconstruction, but mere dismantling. This punchline doesn’t work. Actually, I don’t understand why the structure is among one of the 6 elements. Shouldn’t it be structureless? This can be further discussed.
Education, creativity, participation by the public, social intervention- I want to add one more dimension, that is everyday life. Everyday creativity- when we are in the classroom, when I manage school administration, how do we talk with students, how do we communicate…All the everyday things should melt in the water, formless. If we talk about creativity all the time, there isn’t creativity anymore. Creativity should be like…Ok, I have used up 3 minutes already.
Apart from everyday life, I want to introduce another concept, i.e., community. As education relates to the society and social intervention, under special circumstances，environment or contexts, how can we build a special community? And this community can help us create, in a group of people or in our daily life, something that is very meaningful to us. It’s not to create something meaningful for everybody.
In this world, how can there be something meaningful to everybody? There are always 2 sides of a coin. I look at the matter from a relative point of view.
About education, we can educate an artist, a painter, a novelist, or a performer. He can perform for himself. So, linking to society is not an absolute truth but I like this element for education. If education returns to the aesthetics of Chinese Guqin, we can play music in the mountain to ourselves, or to the nature. There are different kinds of aesthetics. It’s important for things to be linked to a specific community. Take the cross-gender and homosexuality community as a simple example. If we teach gender studies, it’s important to build a community and link it to another community. Inside the community, we do creative or non-creative activities, including performing and demonstrating. Then we build in our everday life something meaningful for ourselves.
OK, that’s all.