Visual Anthropology, 26: 132–146, 2013

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2013.754315

Two Competing Habitus among Hong Kong

Art Practitioners
Frank Vigneron

This article offers a comparison of the status of the ‘‘traditional’’ medium of oil paint-
ing or acrylic in Hong Kong SAR and in Mainland China. This issue concerns the
well-known discourse about the hand as medium; a typical example of what Pierre
Bourdieu would call habitus. The representation of art as something produced by
the hand has been the only habitus in Euro-America for a number of centuries,
and it remains so among many participants of the social field of art. The development
of this habitus followed very different paths in Mainland China and in Hong Kong,
thanks to very different institutions in those places. Those responsible for their estab-
lishment in the 20th century, especially educational institutions, are analyzed and
provide the backdrop for the analysis of the field of art in present-day Hong Kong.
New institutions and new ways for these institutions to deal with art education are
now changing the field of art in Hong Kong, creating new concepts to deal with
the issue of forms of art seen as respectively ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘contemporary.’’ In
ways very different than what happens in Europe, for instance, where even media
that can be seen as ‘‘traditional’’ like oil painting tend to belong to a single ‘‘contem-
porary art’’ habitus, Hong Kong has seen the establishment of a state of competition
between two habitus seen as unrelated. This article concludes with a brief portrait of
the state of struggle between these two habitus within the Hong Kong art field.

THE TASTE FOR IMAGES MADE BY HAND AS HABITUS IN MAINLAND CHINA

Since the early 1990s much attention has been paid by the art press around the
world to the practice of oil painting and acrylics in Mainland China. Many of
the representatives of what has been dubbed the 1985 New Wave Art
Movement—including such trends as Political Pop or Cynical Realism, defined
by the most important art critics of the time, like Li Xianting and Gao
Minglu —was best represented by its painters, many of them having been
educated in the art schools of China where oil painting had been a commonly
taught practice since the 1950s. Practitioners of the kind of painting generally
considered ‘‘Western’’ or ‘‘non-Chinese’’ have continued to be extremely visible,
and many of them (like Wang Guangyi , Fang Lijun , Yue Minjun
or Zhang Xiaogang ) are now internationally established artists

FRANK VIGNERON received a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History (Paris VII—Denis Diderot), a Ph.D.
in Comparative Literature (Paris IV—Sorbonne), and a Doctorate of Fine Arts (Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology). He joined the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong,
in 2004, teaching the History of Western Art, 20th-century Chinese art, and Chinese and Western
comparative aesthetics. E-mail: vigneron@cuhk.edu.hk

132
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 133

whose works command prices that are often higher than any Euro-American
counterparts. That fact has not escaped scouts of the ‘‘international’’ art market
which was, until not so long ago, entirely represented by Euro-American collec-
tors and auction houses. Now that representatives of this art market are starting
to establish themselves in Hong Kong it has become very obvious that these art
practices have had a very different history in that former colony.1
In this article I will consider and compare the status of the ‘‘traditional’’
medium of oil painting or acrylic in Hong Kong and in Mainland China. This
issue concerns the well-known discourse about the hand as medium, a method
that fits so well with the whole context of oil and acrylic paint that it is even
in danger of becoming a stereotype. The link between hand and personal experi-
ence, this thing that seems to ‘‘enhance’’ the meditation of painters, is however
not ‘‘natural.’’ This feeling of a ‘‘natural link,’’ in the sense of an ‘‘obvious link,’’
between hand and mind is more simply something that has been built up over
centuries of making images in the cultures of Euro-America and China: so many
people over such a long period have become so convinced of the close relation-
ship between what the hand makes and what the mind (in this case, personal
experience and memory) conceives that it has become an unquestioned ‘‘truth’’
in all cultures where artists have used painting—whether oil, acrylic or ink—to
create images. Art is by definition artificial, and any relation existing within this
context is the result of centuries of cultural influences, which explains why it feels
so natural, so obvious. One might even say that painting, the act of making
images with the hand, is naturally artificial.
This is a typical example of what Pierre Bourdieu would call habitus.2 In a text
written in 1990 as a preface to Language and Symbolical Power, John B. Thompson
describes habitus in limpid terms as the most important concept created by the
French sociologist when developing his methodology:

The key concept that Bourdieu employs in developing his approach is that of habitus . . .
The habitus is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain
ways. The dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘‘regular’’
without being consciously coordinated or governed by any ‘‘rule.’’ The dispositions which
constitute the habitus are inculcated, structured, durable, generative and transposable—
features that each deserve a brief explanation. Dispositions are acquired through a gradual
process of inculcation in which early childhood experiences are particularly important.
Through a myriad of mundane processes of training and learning, such as those involved
in the inculcation of table manners (‘‘sit up straight,’’ ‘‘don’t eat with your mouth full,’’
etc.), the individual acquires a set of dispositions which literally mold the body and
become second nature. The dispositions produced thereby are also structured in the sense
that they unavoidably reflect the social conditions within which they were acquired . . .
Structured dispositions are also durable: they are ingrained in the body in such a way that
they endure through the life history of the individual, operating in a way that is
pre-conscious and hence not readily amenable to conscious reflection and modification.
Finally, the dispositions are generative and transposable in the sense that they are capable
of generating a multiplicity of practices and perceptions in fields other than those in
which they were originally acquired. As a durably installed set of dispositions, the habitus
tends to generate practices and perceptions, works and appreciations, which concur with
the conditions of existence of which the habitus is itself the product. [Thompson 1991:
12–13]
134 F. Vigneron

Before moving on, it is worth noting that identifying as habitus the cultural
representation of art as being something produced by the connection between
hand and mind does not mean that there is something artificial, and therefore
fake or untrue, in that vision of what painting is. It only means, first, that there
are other ways to represent art; and secondly, that it can be objectively true also:
if many things objectively untrue have become habitus, many other things that
are true have never become habitus; and this only concerns cultural representa-
tions within specific cultures. The representation of art as something produced
by the hand has been the only habitus in Euro-America for a number of centuries,
and it remains so among many participants of the social field of art (‘‘field’’ being
a concept that will be defined in the next section); but we will see later, as anyone
interested in art today should know, that it is not the only one anymore and that
there is nowadays another habitus competing with the idea of ‘‘art as something
made by the hand.’’
At least for my generation in Europe (I was born there in 1965), the social
conditions within which the ‘‘art made by the hand’’ habitus was created and
inculcated were the ones that shaped all those people who had received a
secondary-school education where art instruction, in the form of either studio
art training or art history, occupied some place. The fact that art education was
always a minuscule portion of the total knowledge to be inculcated in the
secondary-school education I received is a very important factor in the under-
standing of how the taste for painting as habitus was established. In Europe,
and in particular France where I grew up, the single hour-a-week of art class that
I received—and that hour altogether evaporated during the three years preceding
the baccalaureate—was, and actually is still, representative of the kind of
second-hand knowledge that was passed on about art in general. But it is also
important to note that it is not possible to generalize at the level of an entire
country and, since we are going to look briefly at how this specific habitus
was established in Mainland China, one should keep in mind that education in
the cities and in rural areas there presents profound differences, especially when
it comes to what has always been presented as non-essential types of knowledge,
like the visual arts. But the following analysis is more a historical portrait of this
specific habitus in China than something involving the methods of the social
sciences, and it will be enough to ask the reader to keep in mind that this habitus
has mostly been a trait of urban areas, the cultural representation of the art of
painting in rural areas being something much more difficult to grasp without
an actual survey. With these restrictions in mind, it is still possible to retrace
the construction of this specific habitus (i.e., the cultural representation of art
as something produced by the connection between hand and mind) in both
China and Hong Kong, and recognize that it has taken in both places very
different roads to become assimilated as such.
In China, because of the way the educational system was reformed at the begin-
ning of the 20th century, the idea of the hand–mind connection in art was just as
fundamental as in pre-Second World War Euro-America. At first, the reforms in
art education, which started as early as 1902, were there mostly to encourage
industry and commerce, very much the same way as it had produced the art
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 135

schools of late 19th-century England. Mayching Kao describes thus the first
changes brought to the education system:

Western art entered China by way of a subject called tuhua ( ), ‘‘drawing and
painting,’’ which by 1902-1903 was incorporated into all levels of the curriculum, includ-
ing primary schools, middle schools, university preparatory schools, specialized colleges,
and technical institutes . . . Western art was a skill—to be taught in school because it was
considered useful in industry and commerce. The Western art style adopted was basically
realistic and academic. [Kao 1998: 147]

Although the next stage in art education would bring profound changes in the
way artistic methods were seen and understood, the manner in which they were
taught and the resulting art practices engendered were not profoundly different:
it was still a combination of copying plaster casts, sketching outdoors and, when
possible, drawing from live models. Mayching Kao emphasizes the difference in
attitude given to the art education promoted by Cai Yuanpei (1868–1940),
the extraordinarily influential first Minister of Education of the new Republic,3
and also the way it made Chinese painting look like a specialist subject while
making Euro-American art practices more widely known and employed:

. . . because the modern education system developed out of the wholesale importation of
Western learning, Western modes of artistic representation prevailed in the schools and
their utilitarian aspects were emphasized. Only since 1912, when Cai Yuanpei proposed
his concepts of aesthetic education, has Western art assumed aesthetic significance in
China’s educational system. It was the creation of a comprehensive and compulsory
school system that helped to spread Western drawing and painting methods throughout
the empire within the short span of a few years . . . Formal education exposed China’s
young people to Western art at an early age. Many became sympathetic to this new art
form and elected to study it further in the art schools and academies that began to flourish
after the founding of the Republic. For the Western-style art movement in China, this was
certainly advantageous. But advocates of Western art in the lower schools did not antici-
pate that the emphasis on Western art, especially its practical and vocational aspects,
would produce generations of Chinese youths with hardly any knowledge of their own
artistic heritage or any capacity for its appreciation. Considered to be superior to Western
art and yet too far detached from reality, traditional art came to be thought of as a subject
for advanced study, the proper domain of specialists; Western art, realistic and therefore
easily comprehensible, was more appropriate for popular education. Such misconceived
ideas deprived traditional painting of its links with the people and threatened its survival.
By 1935 the domination of the school curricula by Western-style art was being outspokenly
opposed by traditional artists, who publicly proposed to the Ministry of Education that
Chinese painting should be taught in primary and secondary schools. [Kao 1998: 157–158]

This return to an interest in Chinese art actually allowed schools also to adapt
the practice of this once elitist art to the demands of a much larger public, a public
that had none of the characteristics of the old literati class. In the end what hap-
pened was a widespread adoption of art practices where the hand was conceived
as a prolongation of the mind, where the making of images was represented as a
direct translation of the spirit of the artist, as this ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘obvious’’ bond
136 F. Vigneron

between the hand and the mind. What had been before a specific habitus of the lit-
erati class, for whom the hand was even portrayed as a possible link with the entire
universe (the idea of nature inscribing itself directly into the painting through the
hand or wrist of the artist)4 [Vigneron 2010: 338–339], became a much more wide-
spread idea adopted by anyone receiving a basic secondary-level schooling. This
situation was only made even more conspicuous after the famous talks on litera-
ture and art given in Yan’an by Mao Zedong in 1942, even though the
hand–mind connection in art-making was then supposed to have been purged
of its elitist undertones. When the Communist Party came to power in China, with
its perfectly rigid attachment to centralization even in matters of artistic taste, it
was no wonder that the even stricter academic practices brought to China by the
most influential artist and teacher of that generation, Xu Beihong (1895–
1953), would become the starting-point of a true official art. To most of the artists
and art historians who were shaped by the anti-academic attitude of the modernist
avant-gardes from Euro-America, it was seen as a case of rigidity added to rigidity,
the then already dying form of art-making practiced in the French academy in
Paris fossilized even further by the political demands of the Party into a large-scale,
albeit rather entertaining, propaganda oil painting. (I would like to add that there
is no need to make any value judgment about the Chinese Social Realist kind of art,
for it served its purpose at the time and, in the context of the Cultural Revolution,
even created extraordinarily interesting experiments in communal art-making that
deserve their place in the grand narrative of Chinese art history.)
Although it was already present in literati painting theory, though only access-
ible to the literati class, several decades of imposed artistic forms, forms defined
by very specific institutions, were more than sufficient to impose on everybody in
China the idea of art as a natural product of the hand–mind connection. And it is
precisely this status of officialdom that has become the subject of so much con-
troversial art in China, since it was the very rigidity within the political system
that created it that became the subject matter of so many ironical and subversive
art practices criticizing this habitus (from Political Pop to Cynical Realism, these
classifications that seem to belong already to a history of art of late 20th-century
China). The way a habitus is transformed can only be understood in the context
of other concepts, of cultural capital and social field, which will be addressed in
the next section where the hand–mind connection in art-making will be briefly
analyzed in the context of Hong Kong.

THE TASTE FOR IMAGES MADE BY HAND AS HABITUS IN HONG KONG

Within the whole cultural construct supporting the habitus of the connection
between hand and mind in art-making there is one aspect that reappears con-
stantly in the domain of doxa (i.e., the domain of non-specialist knowledge) in
Hong Kong. After several years of interviewing young students wanting to enter
the Fine Arts department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong it became very
obvious to me that most Hong Kong students coming out of secondary school
there usually associate art only with painting: ‘‘I like to paint’’ (Ngo zhongyi
wak wa, in Cantonese) is the most commonly mentioned reason
for joining the Fine Arts department. Coming out of the secondary-school system,
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 137

students around 2010 have been educated to see in painting the most common
form of art-making; any other form—like sculpture, installation or ceramics—
being secondary ones while forms of art usually called ‘‘contemporary’’ are gen-
erally ignored. More importantly, these students are shaped into believing that
painting is the art form that is the most likely to allow them to ‘‘express them-
selves,’’ another very common statement being ‘‘my painting is about myself’’
(ngo ge wa hai guanyu ngo jigei ge, in Cantonese). It is this
habitus-within-a-habitus that is quite interesting because it generally becomes the
battleground of certain confrontations within the art field, often taking the shape
of a struggle between the ‘‘traditional’’ and the ‘‘contemporary,’’ a confrontation I
have already described briefly in another article [Vigneron 2011: 6–20]. We will
see that these confrontations can be understood within the framework of the social
fields defined by Pierre Bourdieu, but it is important to first observe how the habi-
tus of ‘‘painting as personal expression’’ came to be, in the context of Hong Kong.
Beyond the presence of practitioners of literati art who could not, because of
the very elitism of that practice, have had any influence in the creation of a habi-
tus, the possibility for painting, and specifically oil painting, to become a medium
for self-expression is rooted in the arrival of examples of oil painting in South
China, an arrival that took place in the context of what has been called China
Trade Painting. According to Mayching Kao:

. . . paintings in Western mediums had been produced for export by professional craftsmen
in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macao since the late eighteenth century. Though never
integrated in the mainstream of Chinese painting, these China-trade paintings certainly
exposed a great many Chinese to the techniques and methods of Western art, especially
in realistic portraiture and scenes of the China coast. [Kao 1998: 146]

It took many years before a practitioner of this type of commercial art became
proficient enough to see the possibilities of oil painting as the basis of a different
kind of personal expression and therefore of a different personal identity, that of
artist and not merely craftsman. The first of these China Trade painters who was
acknowledged to be the equal of a talented European painter was of course
Lamqua (active 1801–1860), who was from the start compared to George
Chinnery (1774–1852), an English painter who himself was a perfect product of
the London Art Academy. Precisely because it came to be in a purely commercial
context, where associations with high art existed but very tenuously, it escaped
the institutional restrictions that defined oil painting in China, even though it
probably was essential in bringing a new awareness of that kind of image to
China. All the same, the presence of oil painters in Guangzhou (Canton), Macau
and Hong Kong made it possible for many small institutions like local art clubs to
pick up the practice of oil painting and establish it as a ‘‘necessary’’ form of art in
the colonies, ‘‘necessary’’ not because of any kind of inherent qualities but because
it was felt to be a ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘obvious’’ form of art by its practitioners. By the early
20th century however the practice of oil painting in Hong Kong had become the
realm only of amateur painters: none of the professional China Trade Painting
artists was still active, as many of the earlier workshops had become photography
studios (it is also important to note that ‘‘amateur’’ denotes a high-art practice in
138 F. Vigneron

literati painting, whereas it has connotations of being simply bad for oil painting).5
In the early 20th century, when the artists of the Lingnan school ( ), based in
southern China, looked at oil painting for their first experiments of bringing
together ‘‘Western’’ and Chinese art into a new form of image-making, they were
looking at Rembrandt and all the masters of the past from Europe and were not at
all interested in the oil paintings made in Hong Kong by bored housewives and
underemployed colonial civil servants.
Apart from the whole educational system in Hong Kong there does not seem to
have been any other powerful institution, similar to those in Mainland China,
which could have established this equation of painting with art in general. It is
therefore in the present education system, the one taking care of primary and
secondary-school education, that one has to look for the roots of this parti-pris.
For many years art education has been a mere afterthought for local educators
and, in 2011, still very few are the schools where art is being taught by specialized
teachers. Since it is easier to let students work with paper and colors than with hea-
vier tools and materials (even though ceramics has for a long time been a fairly
often practiced form of art, it was usually not professionally handled, more like
playing with plasticine than exploring the real potentials of this art form); and,
more importantly, with more abstract concepts, watercolor and acrylics have for
a long time been the most often taught forms of art in local art education. Add to
this situation the fact that art teachers are generally not well-versed in the latest
developments in art since they have seldom received the kind of education that
would prepare them to turn to contemporary art forms, and a very ‘‘natural’’ conse-
quence is that, when students come out of the school system, the large majority of
them believe without any doubt that art is painting and vice versa. Around the year
2004 though, in view of these very obvious lacks in the educational system, pro-
found changes were brought to art education in the context of the new 3-3-4 cur-
riculum that was to see students arrive one year earlier in the university system
and complete their bachelor’s degree in four years instead of three. Although these
reforms will take some time to really produce results, changes are already appear-
ing in secondary-school art education, changes also influenced by the fact that
younger art teachers received their education from institutions, like the Fine Arts
department at the Chinese University or the Academy of Visual Arts of Baptist Uni-
versity, where more recent forms of art are widely represented. In that new context,
the secondary school students who are aware of the existence of recent art forms
and of professional artists from Hong Kong, as well as attempting to engage in
more contemporary art practices, are appearing in slightly larger numbers.

TWO COMPETING HABITUS IN THE HONG KONG ART FIELD

Real changes are taking place in the post-secondary school system and both the
various Higher Diplomas, available to students and the general public, and the
degrees offered by the various art departments and art schools of Hong Kong
offer a type of art education that prepares future artists (whether professional
or not) for the kinds of art practice that would be welcome in the contemporary
art galleries and biennales. Of course, as with the students of any other art
school in the world, very few of the students who received a university-level
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 139

art education in Hong Kong are really prepared for a professional art career, and
the requirements for artworks to be actually visible in a professional setting are
still extremely difficult to define accurately. This difficulty is caused by the fact
that these requirements are constantly being transformed within the strategies
created by the various circles interacting and competing within the international
art field. That is precisely when the concepts of ‘‘fields’’ become very fruitful in
the understanding of these strategies and how they shape very different concep-
tualizations of different art practices. In the same text previously quoted, John B.
Thompson describes how various habitus become competing strategies:

The habitus, and the related notions of practical sense and bodily hexis, are the concepts
with which Bourdieu seeks to grasp the generative principles or schemes which underlie
practices and perceptions, works and appreciations. But when individuals act, they always
do so in specific social contexts or settings. Hence particular practices or perceptions
should be seen, not as the product of the habitus as such, but as the product of the relation
between the habitus, on the one hand, and the specific social contexts or ‘‘fields’’ within
which individuals act, on the other . . . One of the central ideas of Bourdieu’s work, for
which he is well known among sociologists of education, is the idea that there are different
forms of capital: not only ‘‘economic capital’’ in the strict sense (i.e., material wealth in the
form of money, stocks and shares, property, etc.), but also ‘‘cultural capital’’ (i.e., knowl-
edge, skills and other cultural acquisitions, as exemplified by educational or technical
qualifications), ‘‘symbolic capital’’ (i.e., accumulated prestige or honor), and so on. One
of the most important properties of fields is the way in which they allow one form of
capital to be converted into another—in the way, for example, that certain educational
qualifications can be cashed in for lucrative jobs.
A field is always the site of struggles in which individuals seek to maintain or alter the
distribution of the forms of capital specific to it . . . All participants must believe in the
game they are playing, and in the value of what is at stake in the struggles they are
waging. The very existence and persistence of the game or field presupposes a total and
unconditional ‘‘investment,’’ a practical and unquestioning belief, in the game and its
stakes. Hence the conduct of struggle within a field, whether a conflict over the distri-
bution of wealth or over the value of a work of art, always presupposes a fundamental
accord or complicity on the part of those who participate in the struggle. [Thompson
1991: 13–14]

In another article already mentioned [Vigneron 2011: 6–20] I have described

some of the conflicts generated by the ideas of ‘‘traditional’’ and ‘‘contemporary’’
in the art field in Hong Kong, these two habitus taking on very specific forms in
the region. The ‘‘traditional’’ generally takes the shape of a ‘‘native’’ Chinese art
and the idea of ‘‘art made by the hand’’ and ‘‘painting as art’’ that I have just
described. The ‘‘contemporary’’ generally takes the form of other variations on
the idea of the traditional (sometimes simply called ‘‘ink art,’’ although not every-
thing in that category is actually made with ink), all the practices that the French
prefer to call ‘‘plastician art’’ and, finally, all the practices involving some sort of
interactivity and relational aesthetics (I prefer to call these more contemporary art
practices ‘‘plastician art,‘‘6 instead of the now almost abandoned expression of
‘‘postmodern art’’7 which has nowadays generally been replaced by the ‘‘contem-
porary art’’—which I find so problematic). The interactions between these two
140 F. Vigneron

habitus are taking place in exactly what was described by John B. Thompson as
something that ‘‘should be seen, not as the product of the habitus as such, but
as the product of the relation between the habitus, on the one hand, and the specific
social contexts or ‘fields’ within which individuals act, on the other.’’
Many art teachers whose education, generally received in Hong Kong or
China, directed them toward a practice of the sort of painting shaped by two
millennia of Chinese painting and calligraphy, will very often prefer the ‘‘paint-
ing as art’’ and ‘‘hand–mind connection’’ forms of art. Other art teachers who
were educated in Europe or North America (but also in Hong Kong, although
they would generally be younger practitioners) will prefer the ‘‘plastician art’’
slant and encourage forms of art where technology or social sciences dominate.
To illustrate how these different habitus can provoke rather adverse reactions
in their respective opposing camps, I can mention one episode that took place
during a conference held at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 2004 by the great
Chinese art historian Wen Fong. After telling the audience of his discussions with
the contemporary New York artist Brice Marden, who wanted the advice of a
specialist on Chinese painting and calligraphy before embarking on his drawing
experiments of the 1990s, Wen concluded by explaining how he believed that
there would always be art made by the hand, that it was a fundamental human
need. During that talk, I was sitting next to a renowned Hong Kong artist whose
practice ranges from installation to very conceptual works, and he asked me, in a
slightly angry tone, why I did not react negatively to this statement. I did not
really know what to say at the time because I believed also that there would
always be art made by the hand, without for one second believing that it would
replace or handicap other forms of art, and particularly those forms that emerged
after World War II in Europe and North America.
Trying to identify who will tend to defend certain kinds of art, however,
generally leads to superficial generalizations since many plasticians and art tea-
chers will belong to both fields, but generally at different times, and they will gen-
erally not advocate these two different habitus simultaneously. To illustrate how
these choices may become rather extreme, I could mention two Hong Kong-based
art-circle people from Europe who stated to me and others that they were not inter-
ested in painting (this in the presence of several painters who politely hid their irri-
tation). Both of them were, interestingly, German. I also recently guided two Italian
artists through the MFA and MA exhibitions of the Fine Arts department at the
Chinese University of Hong Kong and they were very surprised at how many
paintings there were in a postgraduate art show, adding that it would never hap-
pen in Italy in any art school. Looking at their reactions from a Hong Kong point of
view I thought that they were, of course, too quick to pass judgment because they
were coming out of a very different art education system, one that had been
initially shaped by the most important figures of the profound changes that took
place after World War II in the cultures of Europe and North America. They are
in fact representatives of a social and cultural context that is shaping its own habi-
tus, one that determined a taste for an art where the hand does not occupy a promi-
nent place (this is certainly also a generalization, but one underlining the intended
break great artists like Joseph Beuys successfully operated with the art forms that
still dominated the Euro-American cultural landscape before World War II).
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 141

Like all interactions in any field, where participants constantly reshuffle the ele-
ments of their cultural capital in accordance with the cultural capitals of other social
groups, the cultural representation of an art form like painting is far more complex
than this quick portrait can indicate. In reality, considerations about the art of paint-
ing have been a very contentious—and very productive—domain also in Europe
and North America, as the existence of the 1980s painting ‘‘movements’’ (like
Transavanguardia in Italy, New Expressionism in Germany and Bad Painting in
the United States) amply proved. One could also look at the present situation in
England where painting occupies a very prominent place among other forms of
‘‘plastician art’’ (an artist like Julian Opie, for instance, is generally identified as a
painter, even though his painting is as much a reflection on this art form as a mani-
festation of it).8 Oil and acrylic painting in Hong Kong will generally not be seen as
‘‘traditional’’ media, this name being reserved for ink and the pigments of ancient
Chinese painting. But the domain of oil and acrylic painting, still dominated by the
idea of ‘‘hand–mind interaction’’—but thankfully without the ‘‘painting as art’’
stereotype which is slowly getting erased in post-secondary art education when
students finally get educated in a more professional setting (which explains why
it is still a minority idea, and therefore still a habitus in the ‘‘general population,’’
i.e., the non-specialists)—is also still a contentious field in Hong Kong.

CONCLUSION: CHOICE AND AGENCY WITHIN THE ART FIELD

Many artists around the world have had to vary their choice of art practices
because of the growing necessity to be noticed by institutions that do not necessar-
ily follow the habitus that these artists were initially educated in. Although
post-secondary school art education around the world is of necessity encouraging
a multi-disciplinary approach, students often having to take classes in subjects
ranging from drawing to video editing in the same semester, many young artists
who began with the practice of some ‘‘traditional’’ medium will often also add, for
instance, video or sound installation to their exhibitions. Similarly many private
gallery curators who want their spaces to represent the most ‘‘cutting edge’’ art
forms, a question of prestige, even though many of the same galleries will also
practice a very commercial form of art dealing (like, in Hong Kong or Mainland
China, selling works to decorate hotel lobbies and suites, a fairly lucrative busi-
ness in the wildly expanding tourism industry), will very often demand from their
artists that kind of multimedia attitude. As for museums, their first mission is gen-
erally to be exhaustive in their choice of artworks, the future ‘‘Museum plus’’
(Mþ) of the West Kowloon district in Hong Kong being a perfect example of that
situation, since they were asked to represent ‘‘ink art,’’ a series of art practices
often represented as the most original contribution of the Hong Kong artists active
after the 1960s. In reality though, the more ambitious the institution in terms of
investment, the more likely the person put at its helm will come from this section
of the art field where the habitus is dominantly the ‘‘plastician art’’ one (in that
sense, calling the very experienced Lars Nitve, once the director of the Tate Mod-
ern in London, to head Mþ was both an excellent and a very predictable choice).
Since the mission of Mþ will be one of total inclusiveness, a place where every-
thing anyone could consider art will be given a place, it is already clear that this
142 F. Vigneron

kind of situation will generate permanent debate and uncertainties that clearly
make of this project the most interesting form of institutional practice and one that
has probably never really been attempted before—which of course makes it very
doubtful that it will function this way for a long time. Unfortunately, Mþ seems
doomed already, and not because of any internal dysfunctioning, but because of
serious restrictions on the very idea of culture brought about by decisions taken
by the Hong Kong government, decisions defined by its obsession with the cre-
ation and maintenance of what has been called one of the freest business environ-
ments in the world. One of the concerns attached to the creation of such an
environment is the constant breaches of copyright laws, especially in the domain
of fashion and electronics where there is no real doubt as to the validity of defend-
ing intellectual property rights. The problem becomes political, though, when law-
yers and government officials who have no understanding of recent art practices
decide to include absolutely everything in their bills of law. Although it can be
found in most places, there is in Hong Kong a very rich culture of cultural and
political parody that has taken the Internet as its main stage and source.9
Roles are difficult to pin down in the context of such a visibly quickly changing
field as the one where visual art is produced, and debates often take place in a
rather complicated network of relationships and changing functions. Thus for
example in Hong Kong, what often happens is that the artist whose practice falls
into the ‘‘experiments’’ of plastician art will criticize the ones who work for the gal-
lery system and its involvement in the art market. Similarly, the practitioner of
‘‘native’’ forms of Chinese art will often ignore the art practices of both plastician
art and many more ‘‘experimental’’ forms of ink art. That situation is also true with
art critics, and in a place like Hong Kong where writings about art are made by
people ranging from amateurs of calligraphy to lovers of relational aesthetics,
the gamut of art writings can appear as something that has absolutely no coher-
ence. When it comes to practitioners, this situation gets complicated to an almost
schizophrenic pitch because the same person will often take on different identities
at different times: for example, the plastician artist who has just completed an
installation in a small gallery will take on a much more commercial project with
an art dealer whose only ambition is to sell works to various institutions, ranging
from museums to hotels and business offices. None of these roles is to be despised:
the ‘‘commercial’’ artist and the experimental one, the painter and the sound artist,
are all part of a domain that can be defined as the field of art—"field’’ being clearly
what Bourdieu has defined as a site of struggle. In spite of all this talk about
‘‘fields’’ and ‘‘habitus,’’ we should not see any form of fatalism in the way artists
practice such-and-such type of art-making. Although it all sounds as though there
is basically no personal choice in the method developed by Pierre Bourdieu in ana-
lyzing the cultural world (and by that, I mean ‘‘culture’’ in the sense it often has in
the European media, i.e., art, literature, cinema, etc.), that is far from being the case.
The position of many art practitioners around the world toward art seems to
oscillate between an idea of art for art’s sake and that of an art that relies solely
on the personality of the artist. This position is of course by no means the only
one. These artists seem to resist the notion, a notion I will personally support, that
anyone is shaped primarily by a culture, a language and certain social structures.
But then, even my position on the matter is not that ‘‘post-structuralist’’ after all.
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 143

In spite of what structuralism and post-structuralism established (as well as psy-

chology), i.e., the fact that the Self is created and constantly conditioned by things
over which it has no control—language and social structures, but also each per-
son’s own genome and the multitude of accidents created by the interactions of
these elements—there is still an agency involved in the choice made by indivi-
duals. If the Self is a construct, there is still a Self which is in control of some deci-
sions (not very many, I believe, but maybe enough to make a difference). The
problem of the independence of the Self in a world made of so many unbending
structural restrictions has been at the core of much reconsideration of the aporias
of the systems of thought in the 20th century. In their article opening a volume of
scholarly articles on ‘‘Hybrid Hong Kong’’ in this journal, Chan Kwok-bun and
Chan Nin put into a very clear opposition this question about personal agency:

. . . the schism between Marx’s passionately committed humanism, articulated throughout

his corpus in a host of eschatological pronouncements, and his scientific method constitute
what Slavoj Žižek . . . would call a ‘‘parallax gap,’’ an antinomy that cannot and should not
be resolved. The truth of Marxism inheres in this gap, in the shuttling back and forth
between two axes of vision that cannot be reduced to one another. While each perspective,
taken on its own, negates the other, both are necessarily true. We must once more recall
Kant’s remarkable discussion on free will: science cannot progress without a belief in
law, causality and determinism, but ethics cannot proceed without a requisite leap of faith,
an absolute belief in human freedom. [Chan and Chan 2011: 15–16]

Even though everyone can be an artist in the domain of plastician art—the old
dream manifested by the likes of the French 19th-century poet Isidore Ducasse,
who was so influential on the Surrealists, and, much later, Josef Beuys—not
everyone is an artist, and there is the need for the individual to make several
decisions within the constraints of the above-mentioned conditions before being
able to make things that can be identified as art. So, my position and that of the
above-mentioned artists concerning the independence of the artist may not be as
different after all. In any case, this agency has to be shaped within what has been
defined in this article as the field of art, within the struggles inherent in such a
domain and therefore as both something defined by external restrictions and
by the limited freedom of personal choice: ‘‘both are necessarily true.’’

NOTES
1. For a detailed account of the complex relationship between the art practices of Hong
Kong-based and Mainland-based artists, cf. Vigneron [2010].
2. Although the correct plural form of the Latin word habitus is habiti, Pierre Bourdieu
chose to keep it always in its singular form in his writings (‘‘les habitus’’).
3. Michael Sullivan thus describes how Cai Yuanpei’s education in Germany, and his
interest in the idealist philosophy that was still mainstream thinking there when he
was studying, shaped a new understanding of these art practices: ‘‘In the few months
that he held ministerial office, Cai published his five principles of education, in which
he ranked aesthetic education equal with utilitarian, moral, military, and world-view
education. In a speech made in 1917, shortly after assuming the key post of chancellor
144 F. Vigneron

of Peking University, Cai Yuanpei went even further, proposing that aesthetics be sub-
stituted for religion. His wide-ranging thinking was centered on a concept of ‘‘world
soul’’ that could be expressed in Buddhist, Taoist, or Western metaphysical terms.
He held that the spiritual world could become manifest to man not through religious
experience but in the contemplation of beauty, through which the emotions of love
and hate, sadness and joy, are transferred to the object of contemplation. To Cai
Yuanpei the understanding of beauty, and thus of harmony, was an ethical activity.
His view of the ethical purpose of art was thoroughly traditional, but his assertion that
artistic values were universal, crossing all national and cultural frontiers, seemed rev-
olutionary, even shocking, to many of his ethnocentric compatriots, who had hitherto
regarded Western culture as barbarian and Western art as little more than a useful tech-
nique for representing objects. Though his opponents objected that aesthetic education
was no kind of solution for China’s urgent problems, his concept of universal aesthetic
values took hold, proving a powerful tool in bringing about acceptance of Western art
in early twentieth-century China and in firing young artists with the desire to go abroad
to study it at first hand’’ [Sullivan 1996: 32].
4. In the context of literati painting the brush-ink (bimo ) is the medium allowing the
painter to create a landscape just as Nature is creating landscapes (the fact that the same
tool allows for the creation of text and of calligraphy only reinforces this notion). One
should keep in mind, when reading the preceding sentence, that there is no separation
of Man from Nature in literati thinking: for instance, the most important notion in the
use of the brush-ink is that of spontaneity (ziran ), a word that also means ‘‘nature’’
in Chinese theoretical texts on painting (the modern word for ‘‘nature’’ in Chinese is
still daziran , an expression that could be loosely translated as ‘‘great sponta-
neity,’’ a concept dependent on the literati philosophical idea that the world is self-
generated and not the product of a demiurge or god). The hand (shou )—or wrist
(wan ), as it is often referred to in literati art theory—is what allows the brush-ink
to function unhindered and is often described as ‘‘empty’’ or ‘‘hollow’’ (kong ) so
as to permit the operations of the fundamental forces of nature (namely Ch’i—qi
—which is the essential component of everything, from the most subtle to the most
concrete—and its ordering principle—li ), to take place on the surface of the sheet of
paper or the piece of silk. This idea of emptiness is the one described in such classics of
Taoism as Zhuangzi where the utility of such objects as a vase, an axle or a
door-frame is described as constituted by their very emptiness.
5. In a social context where literati culture was created and practiced by the civil servants
who succeeded at the official examinations, the idea that professional artists were not
practitioners of ‘‘high art’’ was widespread in China. A large portion of the painting
theory produced by literati (the professional artists, not as comfortable with writing as
the literati, left nearly no theory) insists on the necessity to avoid being ‘‘craftsmen’’ (jiang
). It thus created, for instance, concepts like ‘‘clumsiness’’ (zhuo ), which is the sort of
quality a literati painter will cultivate in order not to be mistaken for a professional pain-
ter. Although the idea of professionalism is not so easy to define in the context of
Euro-American painting (the first Academy in Paris was created against the ‘‘craft’’ of
the painters’ guilds, even though academicians also wanted to become ‘‘professionals,’’
albeit of a more intellectual practice of painting), the 19th century in particular saw many
artists react negatively against the lack of single-mindedness in the ‘‘Sunday painters.’’ In
any case, the status of ‘‘amateur’’ claimed by literati painters as a quality would have been
difficult to understand for the intellectual artists created by the Renaissance and perpetu-
ated by the Academies, the Romantic movement and the avant-gardes of the 20th century.
6. To avoid the problems attached to use of a word that was already in existence at a time
art was something utterly different, I propose to use the name coined in France in the
 Two Competing Habitus in Hong Kong 145

1980s: instead of artist, I will use the term ‘‘plasticien,’’ and even Anglicize it by writing
plastician. The use of this Gallicism also has the advantage of allowing us to avoid the
term ‘‘contemporary.’’ Strictly speaking, ‘‘contemporary art’’ would be all the present
cultural activities called ‘‘art’’ by their makers, but in reality ‘‘contemporary art’’ is
an expression only used for certain types of art, like installation, performance, video
art and a very narrow range of paintings. In fact, unsurprisingly, nobody seems to agree
on a definition of what ‘‘contemporary art’’ covers, but it remains true that it is the only
type dealt with in magazines like the American publication Artforum, for instance,
where specialists often use complex ideas to analyze certain types of artwork, ignoring
others as being unworthy of their attention . . . This word also takes into consideration
the fact that ‘‘artist’’ was far too much associated with the idea that art had to be paint-
ing or sculpture; today’s plasticians often have no such specialization and are using an
increasingly varied number of media, from painting to video and from sculpture to
installation (whatever sense you give to the term ‘‘installation’’).
7. To make sure the reader understands what is meant by ‘‘postmodern art’’ here (a term
that has actually gone out of fashion because of the way the term ‘‘postmodern’’ has
been applied to almost everything, a habit that has thankfully disappeared) we can turn
to an influential text written by Craig Owens [2003: 1051–1060]. In this article he follows
the philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), noting that modernist critical theory
rejected allegory as a mode of conveying meaning. He then claims that it was the
re-emergence of allegorical modes in the art of the 1950s and 60 s which made that
art incomprehensible according to the modernist canons of artistic quality. For Owens,
allegory occurs when one text is doubled by another, and he next shows that it appears
everywhere in contemporary art but on strictly visual grounds. Since allegory consists
in doubling an image with a secondary meaning, he shows that it can be found in the
work of Sherie Levine (born 1947), the artist widely acknowledged to be the creator of
the concept of ‘‘appropriation’’. . . This process of appropriation, also found in the
work of major artists like Robert Longo (born 1953) and Gerard Richter (born 1932),
is therefore called ‘‘postmodern’’ because it does not fit within any of the concepts of
modernism . . . Postmodern art uses the whole spectrum of possibilities that allegory
offers. In a sense, Owens recognizes a superiority of contemporary, ‘‘postmodern’’
art over modernist art in that the theory underlying it is conceptually more consistent
than the formalist theory of modernism. After considering the effects of this return of
allegory in the art of the 1950s and 1960s, Owens treats us to one of the most concise
definitions of the characteristics of postmodern art: ‘‘Appropriation, site-specificity,
impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization—these diverse strategies
characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist
predecessors.’’
8. The 1970s in Euro-America saw the emergence of questioning on the practice of art that
took the form of new art practices usually referred to as Conceptual art. Disappointed
with what was construed as a lack of involvement of painters with the social issues
of the time, Conceptual artists predicted the ‘‘end of painting.’’ Not surprisingly, the
1980s saw a reaction and a renewed interest in painting thanks to these move-
ments—Transavanguardia, the New Fauves or New Expressionism and Bad Painting
(that these movements were launched as much by gallery owners and collectors as
much as by the artists themselves obviously derived from the fact that painting can
be easily commoditized, whereas Conceptual art cannot). Since that time the practice
of painting has been caught up in the debate on art institutions, never to regain the aura
it was given after the Renaissance. This debate, born in Euro-America, took some time to
be raised in China, but is emerging with more and more insistence in academic and cur-
atorial debates. Hong Kong artists and art critics have been playing an important role on
146 F. Vigneron

this front. The impact these questions will have on the present art market of Mainland
China, still dominated by the commerce in painting, is still very difficult to assess.
9. It often takes the shape of video, but it can also be found on the electronic dance music
scene where clubbers enjoy creating new lyrics, often political in content, to famous
songs [Chew 2012]. In April 2012 a petition against the ‘‘Second Public Consultation
on the draft Code of Practice for Online Service Providers’’ was launched by a large
group of Hong Kong artists. The petition—demanding a re-evaluation of the right to cre-
ate, no criminal sanctions for the appropriation and modification of Internet content, a
recognition of Net culture and respect for intellectual sharing and, finally, a reform of
the existing copyright bill—thus defined the attempt made by the government: ‘‘Accord-
ing to the draft, criminal sanctions will be introduced against so-called ‘unauthorized
communication of copyright works.’ In other words, any form of creation (namely litera-
ture. drama, music, architecture, sculpture, photography, film, broadcasting, graphic
design, computer programming, sound recording and artwork creation) regarded as
affecting ‘prejudicially the copyright owners’ could be illegal and charged straight by
the government. Once the draft is passed, not only netizens, but all art and cultural prac-
titioners at large will be affected, the right to create will be deeply threatened . . . We find
it particularly disgusting that the government pays no attention to these contemporary
situations and the voices against this bill, but intends it is rushing [sic] to pass the unjust
bill now, and will only consider adjusting its details later. The legislative procedure is
groundless, yet its impact will be devastating.’’ This text could be found on a variety
of websites in April and May 2012.

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