New World Development Heir Adrian Cheng Says Art Is Entrepreneurship
Not your usual tycoon, the founder of the K11 Art Foundation wants to combine his family business with his first love: the arts.
The arts have been my interest ever since I was a kid. At first I was more into music and performing arts, and then later I had more opportunities to encounter visual and installation arts. Culture is very broad and it’s always evolving, but you have to find a starting point.
I majored in east Asian studies at Harvard. I spent a year in Kyoto studying performing arts, and I’ve done some classical vocal training. Everybody wants to study economics and finance. I chose east Asian studies. Because the subject was not so popular, I was curious to know more about it.
I looked into the connection between the art, clture, literature and politics of east Asia. You might think you know because you live in east Asia, but you probably don’t know about the relations between Vietnam and Japan, or China and Malaysia. It affected my aesthetics in art, and shaped me in my pursuits in the art world.
Read More: Kate Middleton's Brother, James Middleton, Seeks Success in Hong Kong—With Something Sweet
Read More: Ng Ka-leung, "Ten Years" Mastermind, Gives Hong Kong a Decade to Choose Its Future
I worked on the K11 [art mall] project in 2008. It was one of the first projects in Hong Kong to combine art and culture with entrepreneurship. The aim was to incubate more local artists and to provide more opportunities for them to be reached by the public. Back then, art and culture in Hong Kong or China was still not popular.
We wanted to groom the audience, and offer a platform for artists to show off what they’ve got. If their artworks were in the middle of some mountain, who would go see them? What’s the point if they don’t reach the crowd? There would be no impact on society. By combining art with commerce, of course it needs to succeed commercially: But at the same time it allows people who are afraid of art or don’t know much about it to develop their interests. It’s a social innovation—a creative commercial model that can be developed sustainably.
In 2010, after a few years, I thought there should be a foundation purely for art development [the K11 Art Foundation]. The ecology had to be built. How? It has to start with the three core groups: the artists, the curators and the audiences. Hong Kong’s art and culture scene has improved a lot, because the audiences are getting younger. The new generation has a great demand for art and creativity. It’s just that Hong Kong doesn’t have enough space for it.
