ICHCAP

A showcase of Hong Kong culture based on diverse intangible cultural heritage, the fourth Hong Kong Culture Festival started its big run last month. The festival will be in place until next February across the city, in places such as the Hong Kong City Hall, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, and the Hong Kong Space Museum. The Hong Kong Culture Festival is mainly organized by an independent non-profit organization called ICH Earthpulse Society, which is dedicated to the research, promotion, and preservation of ICH in Hong Kong. Among ICH Earthpulse Society’s aims are raising public interest and encouraging participation in traditional culture, specifically targeting the youth. In partnership with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the HK SAR government in 2015, the ICH Earthpulse Society founded the festival.

In an interview with ICHCAP, Hing Chao, the festival founder, expressed that “HK Culture Festival 2018 has several events directly related to ICH, most notably the Safeguarding the Community: an Intangible Cultural Heritage New Media Exhibition. The community exhibition showcases our ongoing documentary work on ICH in Hong Kong, particularly Chinese martial arts, using a range of conventional and new media strategies, including motion capture and 3D animation as well as multi-angle and 360 panoptic video. We very much hope to tour the entire or selected components of this exhibition to museums and venues around the world. Our works/exhibitions have already been shown in Melbourne (Australia), Lausanne (Switzerland), and Shenzhen (China).”



The Hong Kong Culture Festival has various programs related to ICH. One of them is an event called “The ICH Mart” that will be be held from 26 to 29 October 2018. This event is an opportunity for people to connect to Chinese arts and crafts, lion dancing, unicorn dancing, puppetry, Kung Fu, towering 55-feet-tall floral wreaths, and a variety of traditional foods. Moreover, diverse exhibitions and competitions are to be conducted during the festival, such as the HK Classic Films Retrospective (17 to 18 November), the HK Synergy 24 Drum Competition (13 to 14 October), and the Heaven and Earth Contemporary Ink Art Exhibition (11 to 26 February 2019), which is comprised of artists from Hong Kong and Mongolia. For schedules and other information, please visit the festival website.