New art heritage : framing street murals in Hong Kong as an intangible cultural heritage

Abstract

At the international level, street murals are widely valued as the artistic treasure and intangible cultural heritage (ICH). In comparison, these murals are treated as a subculture and even crime in Hong Kong. This thesis aims to investigate the historic and current development as well as the characteristic of street murals in Hong Kong, to reveal their long-hidden values and significances. The understanding of ICH has been widened in the UNESCO ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage’ in 2003. During the Convention, the ICH was recognised as ‘traditional, contemporary and living at the same time’, ‘inclusive’, ‘representative’ and ‘community-based’. These official definitions would be adopted as the theoretical framework of this research to investigate the relationship between ICH and Hong Kong street murals. In order to include murals with wide content, rather than solely educational, the research would focus on non-governmental street murals of Hong Kong. The history of street murals would be firstly studied to verify its feature of being historic and living. After that, the background would be introduced by identifying the three types of local street murals, namely graffiti, street art and public art. The social and cultural values would then be ascertained by two case studies of local street murals artists, including XEME, a graffiti and street art artist, as well as Wong Ting Fung, a public art artist. This research would conclude with the correlation of street murals and the domains as well as characteristic of ICH, and lastly, to suggest whether street murals could be framed as an ICH item.