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From music to food to fashion, the arts have long been a vehicle for self-expression. But there are barriers that make it hard for everyone to consume or contribute to the space. The creative industry has historically fostered a homogenous environment, which makes it hard for marginalised groups to break through. This has stunted diverse storytelling, teaching us little about traditions beyond the West.
It’s a missed opportunity. A more inclusive landscape, in which cultural storytelling is nurtured, not only adds value to businesses championing difference, but it can shape world views and offer experiences beyond our own. Though to make art, creators need funding, especially when hoping to land themselves on the luxury map. This is where lenders come in: those who invest in a creator’s vision are most successful when they see — and support — talent, laying the groundwork for fruitful collaboration and expression.
Banks are evolving from funders to facilitators, to do more than just writing or cashing cheques, and instead building relationships across markets and expertise. HSBC has helped founders secure investment, exporters reach new buyers, and innovators access partners who can accelerate their ideas. Given its global footprint, HSBC hopes to open doors in more than 60 countries, removing friction from international expansion while offering clients access to local experts, regulators and distribution networks.
Realising that collaboration is one of the most powerful ways to help clients grow, HSBC has become involved in various creative initiatives. In 2025, HSBC paired artists, designers and creators from different backgrounds and life paths to create pieces that wouldn’t have existed without cross-cultural collaboration. In January, its Sound Exchange programme allowed artist Maitha Hamdan and orchestrator Macy Schmidt to bring New York sound to life through Arabic-inspired visuals, and its Movement Exchange saw two designers combine their distinct styles to produce modern couture in April.
Whether its heritage meeting cutting-edge technology, or the speed of a startup meeting the scale of an established player, innovation often occurs at the intersection of different perspectives. In working with innovators from marginalised groups, HSBC hopes to continue championing diverse representation across the arts.
While many of these changemakers may be the first to bear the flag for their backgrounds, they’ve opened the door for the next generation of diverse creative talent. Here are eight of the creative minds redefining what it means to be at the forefront of culture.
Founder and orchestrator | The Broadway Sinfonietta
Broadway can be — and should be — for everyone. This is the thinking of Egyptian American Macy Schmidt, Broadway’s first female orchestrator of colour, who has brought more women and BIPOC talent to the orchestra pit through all-women (and majority women of colour) orchestra The Broadway Sinfonietta. She started the orchestral collective in 2020, designed to grow the number of female musicians in the industry. Her work spotlighting racial inequality within Broadway music departments has paved the way for women of colour to reach theatrical success. Schmidt was named Woman to Watch by the Broadway Women’s Fund, and helped to raise $1 million for The Entertainment Community Fund through her orchestral production of Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical. Schmidt has also worked on the Broadway production of The Tina Turner Musical, among others.
Founder and designer
Fashion can often perpetuate gender ideology instead of disrupting it — but seeing it with a different lens is Bianca Saunders. With designs rooted in her British Caribbean identity, Saunders’s eponymous fashion brand combines masculine and feminine elements across its ready-to-wear collections. Her pieces are often hailed as bold and gender-defying through the exploration of modern cultures and touchpoints. Founded in 2017, the label is stocked by 37 retailers globally, and has collaborated with luxury brands and streetwear labels, including Gucci and Puma.
The brand works with deadstock and regenerative materials, and has partnered with eco-friendly manufacturer Isko on a series of sustainable denim. With a number of accolades to her name, including an Andam Grand Prize, Saunders seeks to champion fellow indie brands. She sits on the Evo Fashion panel, which supports early-stage labels and fashion tech founders in building resilient, future-facing businesses.
Multidisciplinary artist
For UAE-based artist Maitha Hamdan, much of her education was about unlearning: unlearning the things she was told were gospel, unlearning the love and rituals she took for granted. Now, the performance artist uses multiple mediums to understand life, love, history and faith, while examining her own experiences. A visual interpreter, Hamdan’s artistic vision has encroached into music, reimagining the medium into a celestial visual. Other works reflect the evolving roles of modern Emirati women, her voice powerfully bringing personal challenges to light, breaking with tradition to inspire self-expression. In one exhibition, Hamdan worked with red wax to reflect passion, love, birth and death. Meanwhile, her 10-minute video I Cried, But I kept Holding was screened in a dark, locked box, only to be viewed through a peephole, which represented female stoicism and stifled female expression.
Founder and designer
Mindful luxury is the philosophy behind Rahul Mishra’s designs. Based in Delhi, Mishra was the first Indian designer to showcase at Paris Haute Couture Week. As a recipient of the International Woolmark Prize, he is an acclaimed master of couture textiles and techniques, championing slow fashion with traditional Indian crafts such as vibrant fabrics and intricate embellishments, from beadwork to feathers to foliage.
Mishra presents fashion as an empowerment tool for the local craft community in India, often employing their expertise, skills and knowledge. The end result is a slowed-down process of hand-weaving and hand embroidery that helps build sustainable livelihoods for more than 1,000 artisans. Alongside his namesake label, which has six retail stores across India and a strong direct-to-consumer network, Mishra’s newer line, AFEW Rahul Mishra, offers easy-to-wear luxury inspired by nature.
Culinary artist
After a life-changing food trip to Melbourne, Australia, Janice Wong realised she had a taste for the culinary arts. The Singapore-based chef began combining her perfectionism and artistic eye to create confectioneries that test the limits of traditional dessert, chocolate and pastry making. Since launching her dessert bar in Singapore in 2007, Wong’s brand has scaled globally, taking off in Sydney, Tokyo, Macau, Warsaw, Berlin and the Maldives.
Wong has become known for her signature edible art installations and playful treats like colourful, hand-painted bonbons, chocolate crayons and chocolate paint, each inspired by the intersection between art and design. Her unique desserts have helped to secure partnerships with cultural institutions, such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia, where she showcased her largest edible installation to date, as well as Salon du Chocolat Istanbul, which collaborated with Wong on a chocolate fashion show.
Founder and creative director | Victoria Tang Studio
Born in London and growing up between Hong Kong and Japan, Victoria Tang-Owen realised she had a knack for design while attending school in Tokyo. Since acquiring a degree in graphic design at London’s Central Saint Martins, Tang-Owen’s creative career has spanned photography as well as product and graphic design for some of the world’s biggest luxury brands. Over 10 years ago, she launched Thirty30 Creative with her husband Christopher Owen, a multidisciplinary agency spanning product design to branding, in 2015. In 2020, she set out on her own to begin Victoria Tang Studio, a collaborative platform offering design direction and celebrating Chinese craft.
Under her direction, the studio has partnered with various European couture houses, incorporating the specialised handicraft of Chinese seed embroidery. Some of the brands on her roster include Dior, Self-Portrait and her late father’s label, Shanghai Tang. Tang-Owen was booked by former Dior Men artistic director Kim Jones to work on the maison’s pre-fall 2021 menswear collection, which included a shirt that took 7,000 hours to construct.
Chef
Europe’s offering of Mexican cuisine doesn’t often stand up to that of neighbouring nations like the US. Realising the gap in the market was Mexican American chef Rosio Sanchéz, who headed for Copenhagen, Denmark, after cooking up Mexican favourites in her birthplace of Chicago and working as a pastry chef at New York modernist restaurant WD-50. Upon her early days in Scandinavia, she became head pastry chef at Noma, which has been named the World’s Best Restaurant five times.
In 2015, she opened a taqueria called Hija de Sanchez, inspired by her mother, which followed an organic and local approach to bring Mexican food, drinks and culture to the Danish Capital. Though it was no easy feat securing authentic ingredients, tortillas were made onsite using Indigenous Mexican corn. And if Sanchéz looks familiar, it might be owing to her various TV appearances, notably as a chef on The Bear, whose main lead Carmy follows a similar path of leaving the Chicago food scene for Noma.
Digital designer
The question of whether AI has a place in the arts is a topical one, though digital designer Yimeng Yu believes it is vital to the future of fashion and design. As a fashion design director and lecturer at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Yu focuses on researching fashion in the AI era. She integrates innovations like digital twins and virtual reality into fashion and design production, to build otherworldly fashion avatars and digital outfits. Yu’s work experiments with human-machine collaboration, which was central to her AI fashion film Matter Bones — Emerging Poetry, reflecting on ecology, technology and life. Beyond the digital, she has created designs for a humanoid robot using 3D-printed materials, as well as couture pieces for Chinese stars including actors Hu Lianxin and Qiu Tian.
What these innovators show us is that the future of culture comes from disruption and difference. Independent creators are rewriting the rules by drawing on heritage, identity and experimentation to tell stories that feel fresh. Cultural storytelling ultimately holds the power to drive resonance and long-term value for those who choose to support and nurture talent, something HSBC has been actively doing through its work with emerging creators. By supporting creators at the edge of culture, diverse voices can help to propel the industry into a more valuable future.
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