The Art & Cultural Outreach (ACO) isn’t the sexiest of Hong Kong non-profits – the kind hosting gala auctions or offering big-ticket grants and funding. Its chief purpose is to lease and manage a number of spaces in the Foo Tak Building on Hennessy Road, Wan Chai, most of which are owned by the same landlady and are let at a preferential rate – below half the market price – to emerging artists, usually for up to three years, until they can stand on their own two feet. It also runs an exhibition space and a bookshop. Of late, the venue has evolved into a hotbed of social activism and political thought. Among the activists is Susi Law Wai-shan, the manager of ACO. With a background in curation, Law had been with ACO for five years before deciding in June to stand for election to the Wan Chai district council as an independent. In Sunday’s election she defeated pro-establishment candidate Muk Ka-chun, of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, in the Oi Kwan constituency. Art has an intrinsic relationship with politics, usually in the form of crazy canvases and outspoken performance pieces. Law was able to mobilise a network of like-minded supporters through the Foo Tak Building, which has nurtured a burgeoning cultural community in the district over the past decade. “Art forces us to question the status quo and to create our own hierarchy. It gives us a type of freedom, and it’s something we need today in order to challenge the injustices of a system or violence from the establishment,” Law says. “When I was studying art, some people asked me, what do you make? And I would say, I make things happen. Every day, creatives ask themselves, why am I doing this? And this is a question I find politicians may not ask, although their actions affect seven million people [in this city] on a daily basis.” These days Foo Tak Building’s tenants include not only artists needing studio space, but grass-roots organisations such as independent news outlet InMedia, alternative education platform Mobile Co-learning Classroom, and Liber Research Community , which produces studies on a wide range of issues affecting Hong Kong. The change in tenant mix has not gone unnoticed, and the building is not without its detractors. When this year’s anti-government protests began, pro-establishment media outlets described it as a base from which rioters operate. Law and her colleagues ignore the critics, however. “We focus on reporting that is not commissioned by, or for, an audience that is government-focused – items of interest to the citizens,” says a member of Liber Research Community, Chan Kim-ching. “Ninety per cent of so-called think tanks are, if not pro-establishment, then somewhat institutionalised. And a lot of them focus more on political lobbying, whereas 99.9 per cent of our time is dedicated to pure research.” Topics Liber Research Community has investigated include housing supply, agriculture, relations between mainland China and Hong Kong, and open government. Another Liber member, Brian Wong, says: “We dissect public documents on policy, relating to citizens’ rights to disclosure and systematic checks and balances – issues like the [proposed] extradition law [which sparked the protests this summer], which in Hong Kong have traditionally been under-researched and under-discussed. “Through research, we present comprehensive findings that allow the public to engage in informed discourse.” Research is also at the heart of the work of Archive of the People, a three-person artists’ collective with an interest in the evolution of social and political thinking. “We need more public programmes that allow audiences to interact with political issues from different touch points,” says Lee Kai-chung, one of its members. “Our work … attempts to identify certain debates brought up via historical incidents that have not been adequately explored, for example, the relationship between labour and social movements.” He says many Hong Kong artists are conflicted as they experience an information overload that they cannot translate immediately into their work. Art forces us to question the status quo … and it’s something we need today in order to challenge the injustices of a system Susi Law, ACO “With the ‘umbrella movement’ [protests in 2014], we did see some artists creating pieces concurrently, but not today. The momentum has gone towards posters, people’s projects such as fliers, things that are less abstract and more of concrete use,” Lee says. An exception was the art at a selling exhibition held without fanfare in the ACO Art Space in October to benefit Spark Alliance – a non-profit organisation raising funds to support pro-democracy protesters by covering their legal, medical services, food and aid costs. Dozens of well-respected Hong Kong artists, from Trevor Young to Angela Su, donated works for the exhibition. Lee says: “We will see a paradigm shift [in Hong Kong art in the coming decades], because we cannot just focus on smaller or personal issues. First, we need time, or at least the emotional space to rediscover the impulse to create.” Philosophy publisher and discussion group Corrupt the Youth is a newcomer to Foo Tak Building, having moved in August, at the height of the protests sparked by proposed changes to extradition law. Kwan Ho-chuen is one of a handful of current and former students of the Chinese University of Hong Kong who set up the group. “We are primarily a web-based publisher sharing texts on philosophy topics via our social-media channels, and we host an RTHK talk show,” says Kwan. “We wanted to create study groups and speaker series here, but we haven’t had an appropriate moment or time to host anything.” What they have held instead is live discussions on social-media channels. One discussion was about the resurrection of pro-independence activist Edward Leung Tin-kei’s 2016 election campaign slogan, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times”, the reduction of a movement to slogans, and the divisiveness of the labels yellow and blue – used to indicate support for, respectively, the anti-government protests and the establishment. Ninety per cent of so-called think tanks are, if not pro-establishment, then somewhat institutionalised. And a lot of them focus more on political lobbying, whereas 99.9 per cent of our time is dedicated to pure research Chan Kim-ching, Liber Research Community “We are open to talking about people’s feelings, but also their intellectual concerns, from the definition of rule or law to the uses of violence,” he says. “This period has really consolidated society’s collective need for these types of discussions, particularly when it comes to solving internal quandaries relating to topics such as personal retribution, ‘renovation’ [the destruction of shops whose owners are perceived as opposing the protests], or the extent to which violence is an ethical response.”