Care and attunement in artistic collaboration: two cases in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper discusses the collaborative activities in two projects: Hong Kong-based artist Suifong Yim’s Assembly of Disquiet (2019) and Japan-based artist Shitamichi Motoyuki’s ongoing project 14 Years Old and the World and Borders (2013–). They inform and complicate deliberations on whether artistic collaboration should be evaluated on aesthetic or ethical grounds, or both. These projects demonstrate that the quality and process of collaboration and how the artists are affected are as important as their impact on the collaborators. The personal experiences of artists who initiate and frame the projects also demonstrate the importance of the affective in the collaboration. I juxtapose Nel Noddings’s (2003) notion of care and Lisbeth Lipari’s (2014) notion of attunement to demonstrate how the projects are experimental, affective, and discursive sites for sharing the evolving ethical ideals of the artists. In the projects, it is less the artist’s autonomy and authority, but more the quality of caring attention that they bring out of themselves and their collaborators which contributes to the intrinsic value of the collaboration.