Imagine it’s a weekend like any other: drinks, club, hangover, bacon, matinee, dinner, round two at the bar, snooze on the alarm, and then… Sunday. Guilt from last night’s binge propels you out of bed as you whisper, “never again” and a long-overdue cultural outing promises redemption. Somehow an MTR stop finds you in urban badlands and the misnamed West Kowloon Cultural District. Except, for a few months, it kind of isn’t. The Great Cultural Desert has been temporarily transformed into an oasis flooded with thoughts, ideas, trees, bits of paper, Duchampian references and tactile lead-ins. Some installations provoke questions, others trigger yawns. But amid the numerous intents and achievements, the ongoing Hong Kong Shenzhen Urbanism/Architecture Biennale flirts with the age-old question: “But is it art?”

What to make of exhibits such as The Idea of a Tree (by Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler) whose solar-powered loom tracks daylight by variably threading cotton line through ink, winding endlessly into sky-blue cocoons? Or ANDREA, the self-contained air-purification unit that filters air over plant surfaces? Or even cult-leader Ban Shigeru’s massive cardboard tube pavilion? Is his use of his common material as architectural vertebrae any less revolutionary than Andy Warhol elevating soup cans and pop imagery to an art form? We’re often quick to categorise architects as creating the things we live in, designers creating the things we use, and artists creating things we value but don’t need. How easy it is to forget that Leonardo da Vinci was also an engineer and Michelangelo also an architect. If it’s too much to think of every housing block as a masterpiece or every paperclip a sculpture, then at what moment exactly do you wash up from the ocean of the art world onto the beach of architecture or design?

You continue with this walking meditation, constructing and deconstructing the arguments in your head until, finally, the haze lifts. You realise you’ve been asking the wrong question. It’s not about what art is or what architecture or design isn’t. You’re being led along a creative path where artists, and architects, scientists and sculptors, designers and decoders, all shed their skin to reveal themselves through their ideas and creations. Their approaches are different, so are their skill sets and conclusions. But the journey of challenges, problem solving and inspiration is one they share. In fact there is no question as to what is and isn’t art, only their series of proposals on creativity in all its forms – visual, structural, environmental, experiential and, yes, artistic.

You amble back to the MTR feeling slightly different and more aware as you drift back into the crush of Hong Kong. Thank you Sunday afternoon and thank you Hong Kong Shenzhen Architecture Biennale. You’ve both been very helpful.