Methodologies mapping of the community museum project’s socially engaged art and design practices

Abstract

The work constitutes a series of methodological analysis (in form of visual mappings) of the author's past and current socially engaged art and design projects, which had attempted to link photography, drawing and visual design with community studies and social activism; The visual maps exhibit the methodological explanation of the author's community design processes of various projects , namely, A ) Street as the Museum: Lee Tung Street (2005, HK) , B) The Museum of Complaints (2010, South Korea ), C) The Riverside Scene of Local Agriculture , (2011 , HK) and D) the timely documentation of the "complaints" (a street scene in three stages) during the Hong Kong Occupy Movement (2014, HK); In creating these projects, the author and his team, the Community Museum Project, employed different approaches of community engagement and participatory design to arrive at the visual outcomes, which had, in turn, become unique visual objects for public persuasion (see examples of A) B), C) and D of the above respectively). These approaches, visually expressed as exhibits, illustrated how E. Wenger's (1998) model of Communities of Practice could be applied in real life activism contexts, both in Hong Kong and Anyang, South Korea. This particular 2014-15 Exhibition, organized by the Association of Visual Art of Taiwan, and the Centre for Research and Development of the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, was the first of its kind to survey relevant socially engaged creative practices in Taiwan and Hong Kong since the 2000s. It surveys the different approaches in socially engaged art, participatory design, and social curating currently prevail in the cultural, arts and design circle in the region, (and where the Community Museum Project is considered one of the pioneers.)