Disrupting and (re)making the city : Public art and mental health activism in Hong Kong

In this paper, we examine a Hong Kong mental health campaign which invited members of the public to walk, hike, or run along Hong Kong Island’s coastline and engage with the urban and natural environment as well as ten specially placed artworks. Through a social semiotic and multimodal metaphor analysis, we explore how these artworks convey parrhesia, or “speaking fearlessly”, by foregrounding mental health experiences that are often marginalized or stigmatized in public discourse. We showcase the experiential, relational and disruptive affordances of mental health visual art, revealing the campaign as an activist public art intervention in the city conceived as an oeuvre, that is, a dynamic collective work of art which is also a site of struggles and conflicts. We conclude the article with reflections on two aspects of our analysis. First, we articulate the study’s contribution to research on multimodal mental health metaphors. Second, we draw an analogy between the campaigners’ idea of walking around Hong Kong Island with de Certeau’s concept of walking in the city as pedestrians’ democratic act of (re)interpreting and (re)shaping urban space in contrast to normative, panoptic views of the city.