Student Arts & Culture, Sir Run Run Shaw Hall, and Campus Radio

Since its founding in 1963, CUHK has held up "combining tradition with modernity, and bringing together China and the West" as its educational ideal. On one side: the humanistic traditions of Chung Chi and New Asia, the professional training of the Music and Fine Arts departments, the music heard in Sir Run Run Shaw Hall and the Lee Hysan Concert Hall. On the other: the sounds students made themselves — from choir stages to the campus radio station that launched in 1999 and closed in 2022. This article weaves the two threads together: the first half covers arts groups, cultural venues, public art, and college cultural traditions, as well as CUHK's influence on Hong Kong's literary scene; the second half traces the two pathways of student broadcasting — the statutory campus radio of the Student Union, and the practicum media of the School of Journalism and Communication.

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# 1. The Music Department and Performing Ensembles

# The Chinese University of Hong Kong Chorus (中大合唱团)

One of CUHK's most representative performing groups, but with humble beginnings. In December 1972, a group of CUHK students who loved choral music founded the chorus on their own initiative^※, initially to compete in inter-tertiary competitions, before gradually becoming a performance group of professional calibre. The roll-call of its conductors charts half a century of Hong Kong's music scene — early conductors included Hong Kong musicians such as Tsang Yip-fat, Chan Wing-wah, Chiang Wai-man, Ng Kwan-hoi, Mak Wai-cheuk and others; from 1990 the post of Music Director was established, with Rev. Ng Tak-wing as its first holder; the current Music Director and Conductor, Chu Chik-wai, took office in 2006^※.

The stages grew ever more distant: in 2006 the Chorus first performed at the 20th Macau International Music Festival; in 2010 and 2013 it was twice invited to Bangkok for the Thai premieres of Mahler symphonies; in 2015 it performed the Moscow version of the Yellow River Cantata at the Shanghai Spring International Music Festival^※. On recordings and awards, in June 2014 the Chorus released its first commercial recording, winning the IFPI Hong Kong Record Sales Award for "Best Selling Classical, Traditional Chinese Music" that same year; in 2019 it launched its own record label, CUC Records^※.

# Music Department Ensembles and College Choirs

The CUHK Music Department, housed in the Faculty of Arts, provides students with a wide range of ensemble and performance opportunities, including a string orchestra, wind band, choir, chamber ensembles, and specialist groups such as African drumming, Chinese music, early music, and jazz^※ — spanning both Asian and Western instrument traditions, and covering classical and cross-cultural repertoire. Performances are held mainly in the acoustically distinguished Lee Hysan Concert Hall and the Chung Chi College Chapel. Under the college system, many colleges run their own choirs or choral societies (the Chung Chi College Choir, for instance, grows out of the college's Christian and musical heritage); these groups take part in college assemblies, worship services, and ceremonies, and also perform publicly, with annual concerts commonly held in college halls, Sir Run Run Shaw Hall, or the Lee Hysan Concert Hall.

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# 2. Arts Societies and the Debate Tradition

Among the affiliates of the CUHK Students' Union and the various college and faculty societies, arts and cultural groups are especially active:

• Drama: Theatrical societies operate at both college and university-wide levels, regularly staging Chinese and foreign plays in Sir Run Run Shaw Hall and the college halls.
• Dance: Covering modern dance, jazz, street dance, and Chinese dance, often performed at college cultural festivals, orientation events, graduation dinners, and large campus occasions.
• Calligraphy, Chinese painting, and Chinese culture societies: Organising calligraphy exhibitions and spring couplet writing, echoing CUHK's broader classical Chinese heritage.
• Chinese martial arts (國術): Practising tai chi, long fist, southern fist, and weapons forms — at once sport and cultural inheritance, customarily performed at anniversary celebrations and cultural festivals.
• Debate: CUHK has a deep debate tradition, with both Putonghua- and Cantonese-speaking teams long active in inter-tertiary debating competitions in Hong Kong and across the Chinese-speaking world. Debate teams include the Students' Union team alongside those of individual colleges and faculties.

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# 3. Cultural Venues

# Sir Run Run Shaw Hall (邵逸夫堂)

The largest and best-equipped performance venue on campus. It was completed and opened in 1981^※, and named after Sir Run Run Shaw; its Auditorium, with 1,433 seats^※, is suitable for concerts, recitals, Chinese opera, drama, dance, variety shows, ceremonies, lectures, and film screenings^※. It serves as the principal venue for university ceremonies, major performances, and public events.

# Lee Hysan Concert Hall and College Halls

• Lee Hysan Concert Hall (利希慎音樂廳): Located in the Music Department building, renowned for its excellent acoustics, it is the main professional venue for recitals, chamber music, choral, and other musical performances by Music Department staff and students.
• Chung Chi Chapel (崇基學院禮拜堂) and the various college halls / multi-function rooms: The Chapel serves both as the site of Chung Chi worship and ceremonies and, thanks to its acoustic qualities and atmosphere, is often used for music performances; college halls are used for assembly meetings, college anniversaries, cultural festivals, and performances.

# The Art Museum (文物館)

The CUHK Art Museum was established in 1971, under the Institute of Chinese Studies (itself founded in 1967)^※. Its collection spans archaeological artefacts, calligraphy and painting, ceramics, jade, lacquerware, and seals; from 1977 it added conservation studios, a paper-mounting room, photography rooms, and a carpentry workshop^※, serving teaching, research, and public art education alike. The Museum's holdings of rubbings and rare books echo the library's special collections; see 12-misc/university-library-system-and-special-collections.md.

# The 2025 New Wing: The Robert H. N. Ho Gallery and the Lee Shau Kee and Cecilia Lee Shau Kee Exhibition Hall

On 21 March 2025, the Art Museum's new wing — the Robert H. N. Ho Gallery and the Lee Shau Kee and Cecilia Lee Shau Kee Exhibition Hall — formally opened^※, the largest expansion since the Museum's founding in 1971. Designed by local architect Rocco Yim, the new wing employs a cantilevered structure with exposed concrete façades, covering a usable floor area of about 1,770 square metres and housing a special-exhibitions hall (the Lee Shau Kee and Cecilia Lee Shau Kee Exhibition Hall), a café, a bookshop, art studios, a mounting studio, and a sky garden^※. The opening exhibition, "Elegant Images of a Floating World: Art and Culture in Late-Ming Jiangnan", was co-curated by the Art Museum, the CUHK Department of Fine Arts, and the Shanghai Museum, displaying 193 works of painting, calligraphy, and objects — nine of which are national first-class relics shown in Hong Kong for the first time^※. With the new wing, the Art Museum has grown from a single permanent building into a comprehensive complex encompassing thematic special exhibitions, conservation research, and public education.

The building itself is also a lesson in "campus heritage": the new wing takes the form of a suspended box, propped up on the slope by V-shaped supports, with the shady space beneath deliberately left unbroken; architect Rocco Yim calls this "leaving shade beneath the stone" (石下留蔭), an idea drawn from two landscape paintings in the collection — Chang Dai-chien's Four Screens of Landscape and Dai Jin's Following the Song of Treading on Grass after Ma Yuan^※; the grand staircase inside links two of the campus's main thoroughfares, and students immediately began using it as a shortcut across campus; Yim sees this "scarce land, hence maximal use; flexible, multipurpose space" approach as a "Hong Kong tradition" in itself, rather than an application of conventional Chinese architectural motifs^※. Like the "Tai Chi" imagery Ju Ming once gave the Gate of Wisdom, it is another instance of campus public art and architecture feeding off — and feeding — local legend.

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# 4. Campus Public Art: Gate of Wisdom (仲門)

Scattered across CUHK's hillside, garden campus are several public artworks, the best known of which is the Gate of Wisdom:

• Artist and form: Created by Taiwanese sculptor Ju Ming, originally titled "The Gate", it is a bronze sculpture^※; cast in 1986 and unveiled in December 1987^※.
• Artistic standing: It is the first formal work of the "Arch", the last major series within Ju Ming's "Taichi" series^※.
• Renaming: When Ju Ming came to Hong Kong in 2006 to maintain the work, he renamed it "Gate of Wisdom" (仲門), with the English name Gate of Wisdom^※.
• Location and legend: It now stands in front of the University Library's main entrance^※; shaped like two figures sparring, it is often read as a metaphor for scholarly exchange; it has also spawned campus folklore such as "you won't graduate if you walk through the gate"^※.

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# 5. College Cultural Traditions

# New Asia College: The Ch'ien Mu Lecture in History and Culture

In 1978 New Asia College established the Ch'ien Mu Lecture in History and Culture (錢賓四先生學術文化講座), inviting internationally renowned scholars to deliver annual lectures on Chinese history and culture^※. The first lecturer was the College's own founder, Ch'ien Mu himself (1978); his lectures were collected into the volume On the Chinese National Character and Chinese Culture from the Perspective of Chinese History^※. According to public records, past lecturers include Yang Lien-sheng, Joseph Needham (1979), Zhu Guangqian, Cho-yun Hsu, Liu Shu-hsien, and others^※, with the lectures usually collected and published as a book series. In recent years the lecture has been held in March or April each year^※.

# Assemblies, Public Lectures, and College Cultural Festivals

• Chung Chi College, inheriting the tradition of Christian universities, holds weekly assemblies in Chung Chi Chapel during term; New Asia College runs a fortnightly assembly with public lecture, a core component of its humanistic educational tradition.
• Each college holds an annual cultural festival or anniversary celebration, mixing music, drama, dance, exhibitions, and carnivals — the most concentrated expression of college belonging and cultural life.
• The University's major graduation (degree congregation) ceremonies are usually held in Sir Run Run Shaw Hall; each college also has its own graduation and farewell traditions, running alongside the University ceremonies.

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# 6. CUHK and the Hong Kong Literary World

• Distinguished teaching staff: According to the CUHK Hong Kong Literature Database, the poet and essayist Yu Kwang-chung took up a professorship in the Department of Chinese at United College in 1974, and concurrently served as its department chair from 1975, teaching in Hong Kong for a decade (until 1985)^※; during this period he wrote prolifically, influencing a generation of Hong Kong literary readers.
• The Hong Kong Literature Special Collection and database: In June 2002 the CUHK Library established the Hong Kong Literature Special Collection, holding over 40,000 volumes including early modern Chinese literary works from Hong Kong, literary journals, and manuscripts^※, and built the Hong Kong Literature Database, one of the comprehensive databases on Hong Kong literature; for a full account of the library's special collections system, see 12-misc/university-library-system-and-special-collections.md.
• Literary research: The Department of Chinese runs the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre, which has long organised and researched Hong Kong literary materials (including a research project on the Hong Kong literary archive amassed by the scholar Lo Wai-luen (Xiao Si)).

# Lo Wai-luen (Xiao Si) and the Founding of the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre

That the Hong Kong Literature Special Collection and database exist at all is directly traceable to one scholar's personal donation. Lo Wai-luen (pen name Xiao Si) graduated from New Asia College's Department of Chinese in 1964, returned to teach at her alma mater in 1979, and retired in 2002^※; upon retirement, she donated the Hong Kong literary and cultural materials she had amassed over decades to the CUHK Library — over 20,000 individual items, including newspaper clippings, journals, books, pamphlets, and essays^※ — which became the founding collection of both the Hong Kong Literature Special Collection and the Hong Kong Literature Database; the Department of Chinese then established the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre in 2001, with Lo Wai-luen as its founding director and later adviser^※. Working closely with the Library, the Centre has continued to expand its special collection, which now holds some 50,000 items — monographs, journals, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and archives — and keeps growing through purchases and donations^※. One scholar's private bookshelf thus became the seed of an entire database and research centre — a characteristic specimen of CUHK's humanities tradition of "a person building an archive."

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# 7. Campus Radio: The Students' Own Voice (1999–2022)

Stepping away from the choir stage, CUHK has another kind of "student voice" — campus broadcasting. Unlike The Chinese University Student Press (中大学生報), whose medium was print and which began in 1969^※, campus radio arrived a full three decades later: amid the wave of internet proliferation in 1999, the Campus Radio Editorial Committee of the CUHK Students' Union was formally established^※, marking the institutional beginning of student-run broadcasting at CUHK.

# What the Campus Radio Editorial Committee (CUCR) Is

The Chinese University Campus Radio (中大校園電台, CUCR for short) is one of the statutory, standing media bodies under the CUHK Students' Union^※, on a par with the CUSP Publishing Committee. Under the Union's constitution, the Committee is responsible for "producing broadcast programmes," is accountable to the Representative Council and all basic members, and its mission is to "reflect student opinion and university news, and report on student activities," while also "seeking to obtain a wireless broadcasting licence." The Committee consists of 10 to 15 core members, who must represent at least six colleges, and is directly elected annually by all undergraduate students of the University^※.

# Where It Was, What It Broadcast, and How

The Campus Radio's physical footprint tracks its fortunes alongside the Students' Union. According to official Students' Union documents, the Campus Radio was originally housed in Rooms 113 and 116 of the Esther Lee Building, Chung Chi College^※, before moving in July 2013 to Rooms 301–303 on the third floor of Benjamin Franklin Centre^※, next door to the Union's Executive Committee offices and the CUSP. Because wireless broadcasting requires a licence from the Communications Authority, the Campus Radio used the internet as its primary broadcast channel; its programming covered live podcasts, radio shows, and multimedia content^※, reporting on university policy, campus events, and social issues. It also provided live public coverage of student self-governance activities such as Representative Council meetings and Judicial Committee hearings — effectively serving as an internal "accountability media" — with recordings made available for public viewing via its YouTube channel.

# The Curtain Falls

On 20 April 2022, the Campus Radio announced it was moving out of Room 302 of Benjamin Franklin Centre^※. Its statement read: "In 1999 we began broadcasting; twenty-three years later, today, we have reached the end of the road." Around the same time, CUSP was also asked to vacate Room 307; the University said it involved maintenance works, but when asked whether the media outlets could return after the works, it gave no direct answer. The eviction was directly linked to the earlier dissolution of the Students' Union — on 7 October 2021, the CUHK Students' Union announced it would cease operations, ending more than fifty years of history^※, with a statement expressing "profound regret." Because the Campus Radio was embedded in the Union's statutory framework, its fate was tied directly to the Union's rise and fall. The politically charged campus context surrounding the Union's dissolution is covered on this site only in the form of a link directory, without commentary; see 18-wilder-movements/source-directory.md.

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# 8. The Other Path: The School of Journalism and Communication's Practicum Media

Running in parallel to the Campus Radio's "student self-governance media" path, the School of Journalism and Communication offers a more systematically structured route into broadcasting and multimedia training. The School, founded in 1965, is the oldest journalism and communication teaching and research institution in Hong Kong^※, and has to date trained more than 9,000 graduates; in the 2025 QS World University Rankings by Subject for Communication and Media Studies it ranks 12th globally, 2nd in Asia, and 1st in Hong Kong^※. The School currently operates four practicum platforms, open to undergraduates from their second year and spanning print, English-language media, advertising and PR, and audiovisual production:

Among these, the Creative Media Laboratory^※ was established in 2014 as a "convergence of creative minds," where students receive professional training in audiovisual production "from broadcasting to television, film, and sound installation." The School is equipped with a 4K ultra-high-definition virtual set studio, digital broadcasting recording studios, a black-box theatre, and a high-definition video editing creative centre^※. Varsity, meanwhile, is no mere print product — its content is organised into sections such as "Periscope" (in-depth investigations), "Our Community," "Lifestyle," "People," and "Specials," and it now also publishes video documentaries (via Vimeo), podcasts, photo features, and digital e-books^※, making it a comprehensive student media platform spanning sound and moving image.

# Two Paths, Different Emphases

CUHK's student media ecology has long consisted of two systems, independent yet complementary. The Campus Radio Editorial Committee's core value lay in "student autonomy" — directly elected by all undergraduates, accountable to the whole membership, and in principle beyond interference from faculty administration, free to take independent positions on university governance. Its limitations were real: production resources constrained by Union finances, no wireless broadcasting licence obtainable, distribution relying mainly on the internet — and, ultimately, the loss of its operating basis when the Union ceased to function. The School's practicum media, by contrast, enjoy steadier School-level resource support, and have trained successive cohorts of Hong Kong media professionals over nearly three decades^※, with relatively high professional standards; Varsity and its peers have evolved into multimedia platforms. But their output serves the School's training objectives, and their editorial independence differs from that of student self-governance media.

The two paths are not opposites but complements: in the same era, students who chose to "run for office" (上莊) in the Campus Radio sought student autonomy and social engagement, while those who joined Varsity or U-Beat focused on professional journalistic training — each with its own kind of media life.

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# 9. Industry Recognition for the Practicum Media

Varsity and U-Beat do not merely entertain themselves on campus; their work is consistently entered into open journalism awards, with notable results: at the 2020 Mind HK Media Awards, Varsity students Lee Chi-io, Park So-won, and Tsang Ka-yi won the "New Journalist" award for Broken Hearts of the City, and U-Beat students Choi Shun-meng and Leung Man-kei won the same award for Emotional Pandemic Spreading, Civil Society Self-Rescue^※; students from both publications have also collectively taken three awards at the 16th Consumer Rights in Journalism Awards^※. These competitions typically evaluate professional and student media across Hong Kong alike, so for student work to hold its own against professional journalists is, in a sense, confirmation of the practicum platforms' stated aim of "training students to professional news standards" — echoing the previous chapter's point that CUHK ranked 12th globally in the 2025 QS Communication and Media Studies subject ranking. CUHK's other literary tradition — the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and the translation journal Renditions — is covered in 12-misc/cuhk-press-and-renditions.md, and offers a complementary perspective to this article's account of Hong Kong literature.

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