This article addresses the relation between the political environment during, immediately after the2019pro- democracy movement, two Hong Kong artists’ situated responses, experiences. As the movement forges its strength in the name of unity of citizenship provisionally formed, it risks failing to recognize artists’ lateral engagement with it. The movement demands that participants forgo specificities of identity as it prioritizes a unified citizenship antagonistic to the ruling power. Artists face the dilemma of having the capacity to contribute to the movement by creative, non-antagonistic means, but not having the discursive space to actualize this capacity. This article proposes that Charles Taylor’s politics of recognition is productive for understanding such contentions. It raises the question of whether forfeiting differences that constitute the value of particular cultural groups is a price the sustainability of democratic values can pay for. The works of Sharon Lee Cheuk-wun, Lau Wai demonstrate that a creative space for experimenting with what ruling power is, what it does to citizens, is as important as a space for contesting against it. Their works can be interpreted as associating with Roland Barthes’ figure of the Neutral, at once a figure of experimental thought, a dwelling for playfulness, an open, atopic space without location or ownership for multiple modes of engagement with meaning-making processes(an ethics).