Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema
Interviewing Danny Yung
Dir. Danny Yung, Benny Woo
Hong Kong 2009, 8’
Subtitles: English
Developing a city brand and developing a city culture are basically two sides of a coin. Both are important parts of the primary agenda in constructing a city. Developing a city’s brand and culture is not only for economic ends, or cultural tourism, or political propaganda, or cultural diplomacy, but more importantly, it is to provide its citizens a platform to seek cohesion and a sense of identity. If the citizens do not identify themselves with their own city's brand and culture, they’ll lose their sense of belonging. A city without brand or culture is one with no character or direction. A city without a centrifugal force is a city in collapse. The planning of a city’s brand must begin with a study of its existing culture and its cultural vision. One of the priorities in the planning is to establish interactive communication channels with the citizens.
A wise cultural development understands the importance of cultural exchange, of critique, of experiment, of innovation, of cooperation, of education; equally important is the understanding that cultural investment is long-term, serving local, regional, and global culture, and serving present as well as the future. A wise cultural development also realizes the impact of culture to urban economy, to social development, to protecting the environment, and to political progress. At the same time, it recognizes that we can use a cultural perspective to drive the interaction and equilibrium between the economic and political cultures.
Moving forward into the 21st century, this part of Asia, including Hong Kong, witnessed rapid pace in social, economic, political and technological advancement, to the extent that we have now possessed the necessary economic power and confidence to independently observe and research on the current situation of global interactions, including the growth of cultural exchanges. Furthermore, since compared with the first world, we have always been in an reactive position in the cultural exchange, we can analyze the current state of global cultural exchange with detachment, so that we can objectively and rationally assess the interaction of European culture with global culture. We can absolutely carry out a thorough assessment on the form and content of present cultural exchange propelled by the “West”, and through this assessment to explore new concepts of global cultural exchange.
When we develop a city, we need a blueprint with a clear and long-term cultural field of vision. If we can achieve that, we will then be able to develop the software side such as human resources to operate in coordination with the hardware plans. With the blueprint, we will then not be merely reactive, short-sighted, and grasping blindly at perceived opportunities. Because our city does not value intellectual resources on the cultural side, lack we lack cultural critiques, policy research, and planning tools, as well as human talents. In constructing and development culture, we first and foremost need to boldly discuss the problems in management policies within the cultural system; in so doing, we can then begin to reform the cultural management policy and inspire the management of culture. We need to promote public education in culture on different layers; we’ll then build a cultural foundation for participatory and interactive dynamics among citizenry groups, moving towards a true civil society. When we develop a city, we need to build channels of communication to enable and encourage interaction between the local and worldwide culturists and the strategies planners, to broaden our own cultural field of vision, to have sustained dialectics, and to be forward-looking as we become a city that proceeds in the same pace with other great cities to develop a new world culture
Danny Yung
An experimental art pioneer and one of Hong Kong’s most influential artists, Yung is a founding member and co-artistic director of Zuni Icosahedron. In the past 40 years, Yung has been working extensively in diverse fields of arts, including theatre, cartoon, film, video as well as visual and installation art.
Yung has been involved in over 100 theatre productions as director, scriptwriter, producer and/or stage designer. His theatre works were staged in multiple cities across the world. In 2008, in response to a commission from the Hong Kong Arts Festival, he created Tears of the Barren Hill, a theatre work reflecting on the innovation of traditional Chinese theatre and the institution of cultural exchange, which earned him the Music Theatre NOW Award of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo, Yung, in collaboration with the renowned Japanese theatre director Satō Makoto, showed The Tale of the Crested Ibis, a cultural exchange project which combined, for the first time, elements of noh and kunqu theatres as well as traditional arts and cutting-edge (robot) technology. The annual Toki Festival, curated by Yung since 2012, develops the concept of the Crested Ibis, or Toki, in an effort to enrich young kunqu performers’ experience and promote exchanges between contemporary and traditional performing arts in Asian regions.
The artist keeps a close eye on the arts and cultural policy and on education development in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region. He currently serves as chairman of the Hong Kong–Taipei–Shenzhen–Shanghai City-to-City Cultural Exchange Conference and a member of the Design Council of Hong Kong. He was also appointed the inaugural Dean’s Master Artist in Drama of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2013, and he on the Management Board of the HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity and the advisory boards of the Department of Cultural Studies of Hong Kong’s Lingnan University and the School of Drama of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts.
In 2009, Yung was awarded the Cross of Merit of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of his achievements and contributions to cultural exchanges between Germany and Hong Kong.
Filmography
1998 Memorandum of the Rock (short)
2003 In Search of Modern China (short)
2009 Interviewing Danny Yung (short)
2011 Spirits Play (short)
2021 Interrupted Dream 2021 (short)
