What Do Grey Rhinos, Black Swans And Art Have In common?
Hong Kong has them all.
The term Grey Rhino was coined by Michele Wucker, a policy analyst who came up with the term after the 2012 Greek financial crisis. A Gray Rhino is a slowly emerging, obvious threat that is ignored or minimised by decision makers. The global COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis are examples of this type of threat.
A Black Swan is a metaphor for an extremely rare event that is unforeseen and has an enormous impact. Economist and former trader Nassim Taleb thought of it in 2001. Black Swan events include the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and Hong Kong’s social unrest in 2019.
Against the backdrop of Hong Kong, ‘the Asian tiger’ attempting to tame its own Grey Rhinos and Black Swans with new legislation, two new art institutions emerged at the Victoria Harbour front. The refurbished Hong Kong Museum of Art re-opened on 30 November 2019 and M+ Museum, opened on 12 November 2021. The latter one is an imposing 700,000 square feet building including a collection of over 6,400 unique pieces from paintings to architecture, and more.
Despite losing almost all its homegrown independent news outlets and freedom of expression, Hong Kong gained its art market share. In 2020, Hong Kong’s global art market share rose from 17.5% in 2019 to 23.2% in 2020, overtaking London for the first time (UBS Global Art Market Report 2021). Volatility, unrest and maybe the art that was traded wasn’t political or whatever the reasons were behind the market gain, what is very certain of Grey Rhinos and Black Swans is that they have unintended consequences.
The newly opened cultural institutions finally put Chinese and Southeast Asian art at the centre and yet they weren’t the driving force behind a flux of creativity. Instead, the broadening of the national security law designed to quell out-of-the-box thinking, fuelled a surge in artistry and problem-solving.
In 2017 Haught-Tromp, a cognitive psychologist, led a series of experiments that added credence to this phenomenon. One group was told to write down the first four nouns that popped into their head and use them to create their rhymes. Prompts were given to help them compose. Researchers noted that prompts that imposed more restrictions tended to amplify creativity, while those which were less restrictive led to less creative rhymes.
Amidst Hong Kong’s censorship, people discovered new ways of self-expression from holding up blank sheets of paper to flashmob singalongs and Lennon Walls, but the very broad execution of the security law effectively quashed any type of public critique, at least on the surface it appeared to have vanished.
“Art doesn’t need to please the eye only”, Marcel Duchamp once said. Duchamp was a French painter, writer, and an accomplished Chess Master who wanted to “use art to serve the mind”. He redefined the meaning of art. Whereas modern art values form, what signifies today’s contemporary era is that it takes the creator and viewer beyond the object’s physicality. Art lives in us and requires us to think more nuanced, strategic and ambiguous; critical-thinking skills needed to thrive in today's complex and constantly changing world.
Could it be that Hong Kong’s censorship policies have conquered the streets but not our hearts and minds?
Original published, DutchCham, May 2022
