Remembering Run Run Shaw: Master of the Arts

In Dr the Honourable Run Run Shaw (HonLLD 1980), the Faculty of Arts has lost one of its most magnificent friends. Dr Shaw was extraordinarily generous to The University of Hong Kong as a whole - and indeed to many other universities in Hong Kong and beyond - but it was appropriate that one of the Shaw Foundation's latest and most splendid gifts was of the building at the HKU Centennial Campus that proudly bears his name, the Run Run Shaw Tower (逸夫教學樓). This beautiful state-of-the-art building opened in 2012 and houses the Faculty of Arts, and its smaller neighbour, the Run Run Shaw Heritage House (逸夫苑), is the new home of the Hong Kong University Press. These join the Run Run Shaw and the Runme Shaw Buildings (邵逸夫樓及邵仁枚樓) elsewhere on campus, as the built legacy of a great benefactor of the University.

Dr Shaw was a great patron of the sciences. But in a long and highly creative career in the cultural sector, in film and television, he was truly a master of the arts. His shrewd and imaginative leadership helped to create a stage on which Hong Kong's creative and cultural talent was on display, and from which there emerged a modern Hong Kong identity. The arts and culture are the face that a community sees in the mirror, and also the face that it turns to the world outside. More than anyone else, Dr Run Run Shaw showed Hong Kong to itself and to the world.

In the new building that bears his name, new generations of students and staff of the HKU Arts Faculty carry on the work of culture: the work, like the building, is part of his legacy. In the study of history and languages, art and music and philosophy, and in new academic programmes like Hong Kong Studies and Creative Industries, which would have been close to his heart, the work continues.

"If you seek a monument, look around you." Dr Run Run Shaw's monuments are all around, but the most valuable are invisible ones: the great educational projects he so generously supported, which increase our knowledge of ourselves, and better the lives of many, now and to come.

We extend our deepest condolences to Dr Shaw's family.

Douglas Kerr
Dean of the Faculty of Arts