The narrative of modern economics is often framed as a confrontation between two forces: Adam Smith’s market “invisible hand,” symbolizing a free economy and market self-regulation; and the Keynesian state “visible hand,” which corrects market failures through government intervention. Hong Kong has long been regarded as a paradigm of the “invisible hand,” having practiced “Positive Non-interventionism” since the 1960s. Its status as a free port, low tax rates, and minimal government intervention shaped its image as an international financial center. 

However, this binary economic framework proves inadequate when confronting the complex challenges of contemporary urban cultural preservation and community economies. This is particularly true for culturally significant yet economically vulnerable entities like local traditional family-run shops. Their survival depends not only on the market’s “invisible hand” but is also profoundly shaped by other “visible” forces.

The first visible force is government policy concerning land and macroeconomic control. Paradoxically, while the government professes non-intervention in the market, it exercises significant control over land supply and the property system. Its land auction mechanism drives up land prices, indirectly resulting in some of the world’s highest commercial rents, making it extremely difficult for small shops to survive. Another visible pressure comes from the influx of large chain stores and international brands, which further intensifies market competition. External shocks—such as tensions in the public, the COVID-19 pandemic, and fluctuations in tourism—have only exacerbated the difficulties faced by the retail and traditional service sectors.

Beyond these structural and external forces, the internal dynamics of family-run businesses also shape their trajectories. Many of these shops are operated according to a logic rooted in paternalism and nepotism—an informal governance model reliant on kinship ties, trust, and tacit norms. While this approach may foster stability and loyalty, it can pose significant challenges in areas such as professional management, intergenerational succession, and the capacity to engage with broader networks or adapt to new technologies.

Building on this, the project proposes that the fate of Hong Kong’s traditional small shops cannot be determined by a single “hand.” Rather, it emerges from a complex entanglement of multiple agencies: the “invisible hand” of the market, the “visible hand” of government policy, the internal cultural norms and practices within family businesses, and new cultural “hands” introduced by artists and digital media interventions. In a time when digital platforms and alternative economies are gaining increasing momentum, this research asks whether curatorial and artistic practices can function as cultural mediators—co-constructing divers futures alongside these small shops.

Within this framework, the concept of the “visible hand” is no longer confined to the realm of institutional intervention. Instead, it becomes a contested and translatable theoretical field. It may refer to mechanisms of governance, but also to the micro-level interventions of cultural actors, or even decentralized systems of collaboration enabled by data infrastructures, blockchain technologies, and distributed networks. By repositioning traditional small shops as culturally significant nodes of action, it becomes possible to break away from the constraints of singular economic logic and imagine locally grounded futures shaped by multiple hands.

Launched in 2025, the SATA Mentorship Programme is a knowledge-exchange initiative that pairs emerging media artists with traditional small businesses in Hong Kong. The programme aims to develop a culturally grounded, non-institutional form of “visible hand”—an artistic and technological intervention that addresses the unique challenges faced by small-scale, heritage-rich enterprises. These businesses, while deeply embedded in local sentiment, community ties, original ingredients, and intergenerational legacy, often lack the kind of internal managerial “hand” identified by Alfred D. Chandler as essential for survival in modern capitalism. Instead, they persist through affective commitments and lived values. Through this initiative, SATA aims to apply art and technology as mediating tools to generate new narratives, values, and futures for these cultural legacies caught in the crucible of global urban transition.

This notion of the “visible hand” builds upon SATA’s founder-led project Foreseen Property Agency, which also focused on traditional Hong Kong storefronts. By pairing artists with shopkeepers, the programme adopts a critical curatorial lens—redefining curation not merely as the organisation and display of artworks, but as a relational and political mode of knowledge production. Its curatorial potential lies not only in digitally representing the rise and decline of local trades as heritage, but also in reimagining their publicness, mediating between multiple agents, and proposing pluralistic futures.

At the start of the programme, we propose several lines of inquiry to guide artists, mentors, and shop owners—offering a curatorial ethics and epistemological framework through which to engage the project in thoughtful and situated ways.

1. The “Hand” as a Medium of Tacit Knowledge

In this project, the notion of the “hand” carries multiple layers of meaning. It refers not only to the public hand of institutional intervention through policy, but also to the embodied gestures and demonstrations that convey non-verbal, sensory, and affective experiences. The hand, in this sense, can be understood as a mediator of tacit knowledge—a term coined by Michael Polanyi to describe forms of knowledge that are difficult to articulate, codify, or transfer through language alone (Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 1966). It encompasses embodied memories, situated practices, and the haptic movements involved in craft—experiential insights that have not been externalised or formalised into systematic knowledge. Through the “hand of the artist,” such knowledge may become manifest, translated into aesthetic, technological, and narrative forms.

Tacit knowledge helps explain how craft traditions are transmitted and innovated. In practices such as cake baking, letterpress printing, or small-scale object manufacturing, skills are typically passed down through demonstration, mimicry, and repeated physical rehearsal—what is often described as learning by doing. This process emphasises intergenerational mentorships, family-based transmission, and community-bound oral pedagogies. These forms of cumulative bodily, spatial, and material memory—formed through the rhythms of everyday labour—will be re-inscribed by participating artists using sound, video, biotechnology, and digital media. 

2. Actor-Networks of the Human and Nonhuman

Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), as developed by Bruno Latour and others, this project adopts a relational understanding of agency that includes both human and nonhuman entities. ANT challenges traditional distinctions between subjects and objects by proposing that agency is distributed across a network of actants—a term Latour uses to refer to any entity, human or nonhuman, that makes a difference within a network (Latour, 2005, Reassembling the Social). Within this framework, technologies, tools, media, and physical environments are not merely passive intermediaries but are instead regarded as active participants in shaping cultural practices and social relations. They carry memory, generate meaning, and intervene in history alongside human agents.

This project envisions art as a catalytic space for such interplays. Artistic practices can mobilise the agency of nonhuman elements—such as materials, machines, data systems, and spatial configurations—to transform traditional shop spaces into participatory, co-creative, and dynamic social platforms. Rather than preserving these shops as static heritage sites, the goal is to animate them as evolving sites of encounter where new networks of human and nonhuman interactions can continually emerge.

3. Situated Knowledge Production

“Place” is not only a repository of collective memory, but also a site of latent resistance against the commodifying forces of global capitalism. This epistemological politics resonates with socially engaged and community-based dimensions of contemporary art. Within the historically complex socio-economic landscape of Hong Kong, curatorial practice inevitably encounters the layered challenges posed by both postcolonial critique and local community demands. The curatorial task, then, is to sustain and represent local culture while also engaging in meaningful global dialogue—resisting both cultural homogenization and the residues of colonial power structures.

This responsibility implies an ethical imperative: to avoid reproducing the mechanisms of economic displacement or inequality. Attending to “place” calls for a reconfiguration of knowledge production—one that positions locality not as a passive object of study or spectacle, but as an active subject of technological and cultural authorship. Such a shift is far from straightforward. It requires artists and curators to recognise place as an agentive force in its own right, rather than merely a backdrop or carrier of historical content.

This approach also resonates with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on action and the possibility of new beginnings—her emphasis on natality and the capacity for initiating change offers a philosophical foundation for thinking curatorial work as an arena for social and ethical engagement (Arendt, 1958, The Human Condition). In this sense, curatorial and artistic practices become forms of engaged action, grounded in the specificity of place yet oriented toward the imagination of plural futures.

4. The Potential of Digital Media and Alternative Economies

Traditional small shops in Hong Kong play a vital role in shaping the city’s urban culture and sustaining its community-based economy. Some of these businesses are actively engaged in preserving local brands and intangible cultural heritage, while also seeking transformation and market expansion through the opportunities afforded by digital media. Indeed, artists and research teams can collaborate with local shops to enhance their cultural value and public visibility through creative projects and media strategies.

Yet beyond visibility and promotion, this project also asks: can artists and researchers co-develop experimental economic models with these traditional businesses under the framework of decentralized platforms? Could such models integrate mechanisms like community-supported economies, blockchain-based systems, or membership cooperatives to forge sustainable alternatives outside the logic of the free-market economy? In such speculative economic imaginaries, small shops may harness decentralized digital tools and self-media channels to bypass the monopolistic power of large e-commerce platforms and corporate chains—establishing more direct, emotionally resonant relationships with their customers.

This approach not only contributes to the protection of the local economic ecology, but also fosters a more community-driven and humane mode of economic practice. It reorients value creation toward shared experiences, social trust, and mutual support—resisting extractive models and advancing a vision of commerce that is embedded in care and cultural continuity.

Conclusion

In the aftermath of the pandemic, the question of how to sustain and honour local cultures remains fraught with uncertainty. Yet perhaps the “visible hand” need not be understood as a singular logic of governance, but rather as an ongoing negotiation—unfinished, open-ended. It may take the form of a handwritten ledger tucked behind the counter of an old shop, or emerge as a cutting-edge protocol of decentralized cooperation. It may be shaped by the weight of collective memory, or unfold through the questions posed by an artist working gently within its folds.

If we are able to reimagine the relationships between these gestures—between the hands that preserve, that question, that build—then the future of traditional shops need not be framed solely in terms of preservation. Instead, it becomes a matter of co-creation: a shared authorship of value, memory, and possibility.

Jianru Wu is a curator and researcher based in Hong Kong. Her work explores how digital media shapes social relations, the philosophy of technology, nontraditional kinship structures. In 2019, she founded the Media Lab at Times Museum, conceived as a platform for institutional critique and designed to challenge the entrenched frameworks of contemporary art institutions. She served as its chief curator until 2022.

She is also an experienced writer and editor. Wu was the editor of the exhibition publication for One Hand Clapping at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017–2018), and has contributed to numerous books for artists and museums. Most recently, she co-edited the open-access series Cybernetics for the 21st Century. Her writing has appeared in Artforum International, Ocula, ArtReview, among others.

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