What is the role of institutional logics in the creation and success in the arts in Hong Kong?

This thesis attempts to explore the institutional logics in the Hong Kong art world and the way that the identified institutional logics relate to the success of the Hong Kong artist. The existing literature seldom explores the Hong Kong contemporary art world and the concept of institutional logics is never analyzed in this context. The concept of institutional logics is to explain the behavior that the Hong Kong artist follows during their creation process, which is the first step of the research. The value-based approach is also covered in this study as I find out that some of the elements are similar to the institutional logics. The second step of this research is to explore how the artist defines success and analyze the relation between the identified logics and their defined success. The institutional logics vary from industries so this thesis is to explore what logics exist in the Hong Kong art world. A method to identify the institutional logics in the Hong Kong art world is through semi-structured in-depth interviews. 13 artists have been interviewed and they have talked about their creation ideas, how the artistic, sociological and market perspectives influence their creation ideas. The way of the existence of the Hong Kong art world was discussed, as well as their opinion on being a successful artist. The research result is that the three logics are identified in the Hong Kong art world. They are the artistic logic, the social logic and the market logic. It does not mean that each of the interviewed artist follows one logic exclusively. Instead, the phenomenon of following two or all the logics are discovered and the situation of the combined logics also exists. The artistic logic is contradictory with the market logic in nature but in the Hong Kong art world, actors like the art manager or the gallery owner tolerate the existence of the two logics at the same time. The artistic and the social logics are also co-existed. About the findings on success, the definition of success is discussed in two aspects, and they are internal success and external success. The internal success goes beyond our conventional way of understanding success because it focuses on the development of the artistic career of the artist themselves and their career in a life-long process rather than being recognized and the commercial success. The research result also shows that following the artistic logic is highly relevant to the internal success. This thesis also discovers that the Hong Kong artist is more favourable to the internal success rather than the external success, which is being recognized and recorded in the history of the arts. This thesis explains that the Hong Kong artists follows mainly the artistic logic and the importance of the market logic is the least.