Art in hospitals: The aesthetic-cultural turn of caring space

Abstract

While architects have created spaces that help hospital inhabitants, art has become another means of space-making. Visual art in hospital settings examines the role of overlapping physical, social and symbolic environments in producing a caring milieu. This paper uses firsthand working experience in creating art in the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital (CMH), utilizing the creative process of public art commissions as an example to demonstrate what art can contribute beyond helping create a ‘therapeutic environment’, and how art’s artistic and educational role can meet the hospital’s cultural turn. The aesthetics of the Chinese Medicine Hospital is deeply rooted in Western caring tradition and Eastern therapeutic philosophy. With a historical survey of art and aesthetics in Western and Chinese healthcare traditions and reflecting on the theoretical framework of contemporary visual space making, this paper will demonstrate how hospital artworks reveal today’s caring space’s aesthetic and cultural transformation. Fundamentally, art in the caring space has the same goals as therapy: socialization, communication, healing, appreciation of life and even, in some respects, an affirmation of spirituality. With the help of art projects, hospitals are developing a new cultural role in caring communities. The art projects in Chinese medicine hospitals are being developed with the principle of care. Its intrinsic value and instrumental worth give a renewed sense of community and civic pride. This article is part of a special issue: ‘Re-creating Care as Mattering Practices’.