Newsletter 2021-09-30
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September Newsletter from Arts for Good Foundation
Welcome to the September 2021 newsletter from Arts For Good Foundation. This month, students from our supporting schools have been exploring big questions of "how do we see our community, and how does our community see us?". This project, like others, was designed with inspiration from The Arts as Civic Commons (ArtC), which was a research-based project between Project Zero (PZ), the Harvard Graduate School of Education and schools in other countries. ArtC used a framework that focused on three dimensions of civic life - identities, systems, and visions - to explore how art viewing and art making helps students reflect on these three dimensions of their civic life.

Best regards,
Amanda H Sun
Change Maker
Founder& Director
Arts for All, Arts for Good, Arts for Inclusion
 
Sham Shui Po Community Tour and Storytelling through Photography

Our Sham Shui Po community storytelling through photography programme was a great success with over 50 beneficiaries from the German Swiss International School (GSIS), Chinese International School (CIS), and HHCKLA Buddhist Ching Kok Lin Association School from the North District of Hong Kong.

Through community tours, and in-school workshops and exhibitions, we intended to guide the students to explore the connections between a photographer and his/her subjects (or objects); to realise the power of narratives with perspectives; and to convey different feelings as photographers.  More importantly, we aimed to guide them to seek universal values in different neighbourhoods, and to reflect on and appreciate the positive values that we all share as human beings.

We were so impressed by how they used their verbal and visual languages to analyse the images, to create their own stories based on their own feelings, to recognise other perspectives that they couldn't imagine by themselves, and to curate a story by seeking common themes and working collaboratively to reconcile different opinions.  We were so proud of the "Sham Shui Po Contrast" that the CIS students have created, and we are looking forward to seeing more stories from other schools soon.

Last but not least, we send our deepest gratitude for the tremendous onsite support provided by our student volunteers from the University of Hong Kong, City University of  Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.  They have deepened our vision of building a student-led art community in Hong Kong. We look forward to our future collaborations with local universities, and welcome more mature learners to help younger ones to appreciate art viewing and art making, in order to broaden all our perspectives on Hong Kong and to the world.
 
School Talks

We are delighted to have had the opportunities to share the power of art with over 400 high school students at Good Hope School.

Through our stories, we were delighted to connect with the youths and encouraged them to develop their deeper thinking skills.  In particular, we hope the art viewing experience helped them to reflect on the questions such as : "Who are we? How do our systems work? and How do we dream differently based on our powers of imagination.

More importantly, we encouraged them to think of art as something substantial in their lives, rather than just a subject at school, and to interpret artworks from various persepetives by asking open-ended questions.
 
 
Educational Art Tour to Mythologies: Surrealism and Beyond at HKMOA

Our series of educational tours to the HKMOA Mythologies: Surrealism and Beyond exhibition were definitely inspiring.  We had the educational tours with five young art lovers from GSIS, and five art enthusiasts referred to us by Society for Community Organisation (SoCo).

We successfully made "surrealism" relevant to them, helped them better understand the artworks by imagining other people’s lives, and more importantly, urged them to explore their visual thinking skills, and to spark their creativity and curiosity by drawing surrealistic images together.
 
School Projects

Through the good work of Arts for Good Foundation, we hope to bring art viewing and art making, guided by bigger questions around us, to all students in Hong Kong.

We hope to expand our network to include more frontline educators, school decision makers, NGOs, art professionals and enthusiasts to continue to explore the power of art for our shared vision of Education for a Better Future.

"Art expands ourselves to the areas that we don't just think about ourselves" -Artist Shirin Neshat
 
Past Newsletters:
 
Arts for Good Foundation, Hong Kong SAR China