Felicia Schwartz, Co-founder at H!TANG&ChinaCreativeConnections, talks about her mission to bring art and business closer together
Interview by Ophelia Ren, photo by Sui.

The H!TANG&ChinaCreativeConnections team: Felicia Schwartz at 11pm, Tobias Zuser at midnight,Carissa Holm at 1.30pm, Sean Silbert at 4.30pm, and Elva Gao at 7 pm. Photo taken at Talking Point.

H!TANG&ChinaCreativeConnect ions is a PR and events company that focuses on the arts; their expertise includes visual and performing arts, and extends to the creative industries at large, such as design and architecture. Besides servicing clients across these fields and working with related cultural institutions and embassies, they also address corporate clients with a mission to connect business and the arts.

Felicia, you’ve worked for some really big names in advertising. What made you decide to leave that life and become an entrepreneur? Basically, this is my personal passion and interest. What I liked about the bigger firms was that you had the creative process on one side, but were also able to see many different industries. But at the end of the day, I didn’t like that the end goal was to sell more boxes of whatever product. I thought that if there were a chance to promote what I really love, and what I am really passionate about, the whole thing would have more meaning for me.

Tell us a little bit about H!TANG&CCC. The company was founded almost six years ago by my partner, a French lady, and myself. My partner was working in marketing and I came from advertising background. Both of us had this idea to take the knowledge and experience we had from our former profession and apply those to an area we felt very passionate about. That’s how the concept was born! She brought to the table experience in theater, production, and jazz, and I added my interest in strategy and helping companies connect with artists. From there grew step by step a myriad of projects working with companies, cultural institutions, embassies, design companies, architectural firms, and other actors throughout the creative industry.

So how exactly do you connect business with art? After working in branding for a long time I realized that brands were looking for a point where they connect with the consumers, and for many companies, this point happens when they connect to their customers through an experience. China is still in a very early phase when it comes to this, so a lot of the things we do are events based. But when the market matures we know that more companies will want to engage in sponsorships, and that brands will become the initiators of art related projects.

Do you think it’s difficult to connect business with the arts? It can be a little bit difficult, mostly because the logic of both sides are very different, as are the motivations, the reasons, and the expectations of both sides. That is why you need somebody like us to be in the middle and make the bridge. Artists have completely different logic from marketing managers. The market man manager is focusing on his sales target, and plans very carefully. They expect things to happen quickly and efficiently. The artist isn’t thinking about the commercial aspects, or the efficiency. They just care about the art. The key to connecting business with art is to understand both sides.

You organized an event for the French embassy that included a guzheng and piano improvisational piece. How was this received by the audience? This event was the opening of the French embassy in its new location. Of course the essence of a diplomatic mission in another country is to create bridges between the represented and the host country, also on a cultural level. So our concept for a rather fusion-based performance and visual content was readily accepted by both the client and the audience. But more than that we wanted to underscore that art can’t really be divided into “Chinese” and “other”. The piano and guzheng went in and out with different musical themes. Sometimes the French pianist would play something that was more Chinese, sometimes the guzheng player would follow western themes. When you get into arts, you can’t really say this is Chinese, this is Western.