No longer aspirational: A case study of young creative workers in Hong Kong who quit

Abstract

While many young creative workers are braving precaritization presumably with the drive of aspiration, this article focuses on the other end of their career path: disillusionment. Informed by the experiences of five self-proclaimed wenyi qingnian – loosely translated as cultural youth – in Hong Kong, this article tracks their aspirations which kept them hoping and going till they were disillusioned and decided to quit. Drawing together two lines of research – on precarity and on failure – our study fills in a gap of the scholarship on creative work and workers that is dominated by concerns with precarity and related abuses. We attend not only to the abuse, exploitation and precarity of creative work, but to a more open understanding of how and why young creative practitioners leave. We do so with an unusual deployment of longitudinal inquiry that does not only concern itself with struggles of creative workers but also with the termination of such struggles. We observe four dimensions of failure: their increasingly precarious way of life; their disillusionment with creativity; the urgency posed by their ‘ageing’; and the specific local political situation. As transpired, only one factor is immediately related to precarity. This article argues to include ‘failure’ as a significant phase of creative work, that warrants further investigation and may open up more understanding on precarity, or in general, creative work and workers. While precarity is dominantly defined in economic and market-related terms – with good reasons – we see the need to loosen it up to acknowledge more aspects of precarity and experiences of creative work. This article is part of the Special Issue Creative Labour in East Asia.

‘They don’t need us’: affective precarity and critique in transnational media work from the margins of ‘Cultural China’

“…Although there is a growing body of research based on non-Western case studies which show that creative workers engage routinely in a complex array of labour 6 6 practices that do not necessarily abide by the monetary, profit-seeking logic of neoliberalism (Alacovska & Gill 2019: 8;Wong & Chow 2020;Chow 2019), the majority of these studies focus on national creative industries (Kim 2014;Lin 2018;Wang & Keane 2020). Media globalization, however, raises questions about how the increasing transnationalization of production impacts on creative labour.…”

The Role of Social Capital and Knowledge Capital for Freelance Creative Workers in Audiovisual Industry

“…Previous studies which discussed the survivability of freelance creative workers amidst the insecurity faced in the industry were explained by referring to three factors. First, the workers' survival strategy used their social networks (Blair 2001;Hermes et al 2017;Mrozowicki and Trappman 2021;Norback and Sthyre 2019;Wong and Chow 2020). Second, the utilization of various knowledge and competencies workers possess (Dowd and Pinheiro 2013;Lingo and Tepper 2013;Throsby and Zednik 2011;Stokes 2021).…”

Pluralising China as Method: Decolonising cultural mediations in the global South

“…This inadequacy manifests in multiple facets across varying research areas. For instance, de Kloet et al (2020, p. 6) argued that the existing scholarship in Creative Labour Studies is haunted by a Eurocentric bias, running the risk of overlooking different context-specific socio-political dynamics (also see Tse & Shum, 2023; Wong & Chow, 2020). While the European creative industries policy has followed the discourse of either the “economization of culture” or the “culturalization of the economy” which “tends to use market reasoning to dissociate culture and media from socio-political concerns” (de Kloet et al, 2020, p. 349), in the case of China, “culture and creativity are not only touted for ‘restructuring economy,' but also designated as instrument for wielding ‘soft power' and maintaining social stability” (de Kloet et al, 2020, p. 349).…”