Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2019 Reconfiguring <Post->Colonial Local Relations through Things, Places and Bodies in Hong Kong Culture and Society Wu, Helena Yuen-Wai Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-174131 Dissertation Published Version Originally published at: Wu, Helena Yuen-Wai. Reconfiguring <Post->Colonial Local Relations through Things, Places and Bodies in Hong Kong Culture and Society. 2019, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts. Reconfiguring ‘Post-’colonial Local Relations through Things, Places, and Bodies in Hong Kong Culture and Society Thesis presented to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Zurich for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Helena Yuen-wai Wu Accepted in the fall semester 2017 on the recommendation of the Doctoral Committee: «Prof. Dr. Andrea Riemenschnitter» Prof. Dr. Sandro Zanetti Prof. Dr. Stephen Yiu-wai Chu Zürich, 2019 ABSTRACT The thesis explores how Hong Kong’s local is varyingly conceived and perceived, and how different local relations are constellated through the representation of thing, place, and bodies in cultural expression such as cinema, literature, and others, and their subsequent circulation in Hong Kong culture and society against different socio-political contexts. After the reversion of the sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, several critical moments started to emerge one after another: from the Asian financial breakdown in 2002, the SARS epidemic outbreak in 2003, to the civil disobedience campaign Umbrella Movement in 2014. Embedded within are the deeply sedimented colonial experiences of generations of Hong Kong people and what I call the “hangover” condition caused by the newly gained ‘post’-colonial status of the city. In addition to the local crises and changes that took place amidst the handover of sovereignty, post-1997 Hong Kong is faced with a rather challenging situation: the restructuring of a grand narrative through decolonizing efforts of the government, the shrinking border between Hong Kong and China, the contested relationships of the colonial past and the postcolonial present, and the many socio-political conflicts and cultural clashes between the local and the national, whose identities and voices remain ambiguous on many levels. In light of this, my thesis offers a critical response to the varying emotions and cultural forms that are vented out through artistic expression and aesthetic representation of specific things, places, and bodies that can also be found in the situated reality. These include but are not limited to “Kowloon King” Tsang Tsou-chou and his calligraphy, Sung Wong Toi and the émigré-literati community, Lion Rock and generations of “Hongkongers,” the film Ten Years and the spectatorships it engendered. By analysing the reciprocity between cultural currency in representation and remediation, and material impacts such as social responses and phenomena, the thesis aims to uncover different local relations from the latent to the manifest level in the changing socio-political landscape of Hong Kong. These reconfigured local relations differ from one another in their forms in terms of the mode of appearance, in their connectivities with Hong Kong’s local, and in their affinities with different things, places, and bodies; in return, different localnesses, as manifold manifestations of local, are revealed to be constructed through the constellations of different things, places, and bodies, whose agencies are acknowledged in the process of the analysis. By examining the postcolonial condition shared by Hong Kong and all these things, places, and bodies whose agencies were once neglected, the thesis engenders a renewed politics of representation, materiality, and appearance, where alternative “Hong Kongs” and “locals” can be mapped out through different reciprocal relationships made available in the processes of mediation, remediation, and intermediation. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 - Introduction: Hong Kong Stories with Things, Places, and Bodies 1 Chapter 2 - Hong Kong Localnesses: Translation, Transformation, and Remediation 31 Chapter 3 - A Tale of Two Rocks (I): Sung Wong Toi 69 Chapter 4 - A Tale of Two Rocks (II): The Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Reenchantment of Lion Rock 111 Chapter 5 - Locations of Hong Kong Localness(es): Ten Years as a Crossing Point 153 Chapter 6 - Conclusion: Postcolonial Local Relations with Things, Places, and Bodies 188 Bibliography 215 TABLES 2.1 Public events organized in Hong Kong from 2011 to 2016 with different P.38 allusions to Lion Rock 2.2 A list of public exhibitions where Tsang’s works or the photographic images of P.51 his works were displayed ILLUSTRATIONS 2.1 A pillar at the Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry covered by Tsang Tsou-choi's writing. P.46 (Courtesy: Wrightbus) 2.2 The film poster of Queen of Kowloon with the use of Tsang Tsou-choi’s writing P.52 in the background 2.3 The last scene of the Swipe commercial (2000): Tsang sitting on his ‘throne’ in P.56 front of the Peninsula Hotel 2.4 The calligraphy of Tsang Tsou-choi with his family genealogy as a theme P.63 (Courtesy: City University of Hong Kong) 3.1 Sung Wong Toi, ca. 1920 P.73 (Courtesy: Hong Kong Public Library) 3.2 Sung Wong Toi and its visitors, ca. 1920s P.76 (Courtesy: Hong Kong Public Library) 3.3 Sung Wong Toi and its surroundings, ca. 1920 P.93 (Courtesy: Hong Kong Public Library) 4.1 Lion Rock and the neighbourhood below the Lion Rock P.114 4.2 Film still from Wong Ping’s “Under the Lion Crotch” (2012) P.136 (Source: Vimeo) 4.3 Lion Rock and the banner “I want genuine universal suffrage” P.141 4.4 Still from the commercial “New Lion Rock Spirit”: Young people P.146 (Source: Youtube) 4.5 Still from the commercial “New Lion Rock Spirit”: “Is life only about making P.147 money and making money?” (Source: Youtube) 4.6 Ending scene of the commercial “New Lion Rock Spirit”: Lion Rock from a P.150 different angle (Source: Youtube) Chapter 1 - Introduction: Hong Kong Stories with Things, Places, and Bodies The story seems to get simpler; the story seems to get more complicated. It leads to other stories, breaks off and begins again, begins and falters. The story is getting shorter, flatter. Everyone is telling it—the story of Hong Kong. Everyone is telling a different story. — Leung Ping-kwan / Yasi1 “The Hong Kong Story” is a permanent exhibition installed in the Hong Kong Museum of History, run by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government, since 2001. Established in the post-handover era, the exhibition and the museum compensate, to a certain extent, for the lack of comprehensive coverage of local history in any museum context previously in the city under colonialism.2 Meanwhile, for two decades after the 1 Ping-kwan Leung, “The Story of Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong Collage, trans. Martha Cheung (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998), 3. 2 When the first city hall was built in Hong Kong in 1869, a public museum was also set up inside the building. However, the history of Hong Kong was never the main theme of the museum. When the city 2 When the first city hall was built in Hong Kong in 1869, a public museum was also set up inside the building. However, the history of Hong Kong was never the main theme of the museum. When the city hall was demolished in 1947 to give way to high-rise buildings in the area, a new city hall was not built until 1962. With the inauguration of the new city hall almost a century after the first one was built, the City Museum and Gallery of Art was first introduced and was installed inside the complex. In 1975, the City Museum and Gallery of Art was officially divided into two separate bodies, namely the History Museum and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. The History Museum started with an exhibition space of 700 m2 rented in Star House, a commercial building, in Tsim Sha Tsui, while the storage and other offices were located in Kowloon Park. In 1983, the museum moved to the renovated barracks in Kowloon Park; in 1998, the museum was finally installed in its current site which was considered to be its permanent premise so far. For further reference, see: Ching-hin Ho, “A Review of the Development of the Hong Kong Museum of History in the Past 30 Years: From a Small Gallery to a Fully Built Museum,” Hong Kong Museum of History, last modified September 22, 2015, accessed October 10, 2016, http://hk.history.museum/en_US/web/mh/publications/spa_pspecial_10_01.html. Emily Stokes-Rees, “Recounting History: Constructing a national narrative in the Hong Kong Museum of History,” in National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, ed. Arne Bugge Amundsen et al. (London: Routledge, 2011), 342. Eva Kit-wah Man, “A Museum of Hybridity: The History of the Display of Art in the Public Museum of Hong Kong, and its implications for Cultural Identities,” in Hybrid Hong Kong, ed. Kwok-bun Chan (London: Routledge, 2014), 138-139. 1 reversion of the sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, the entanglement of past colonial experiences and the newly gained quasi-postcolonial condition, as well as the relation and the contestation of the global, the local, and the national, have showed that the colonial-postcolonial transition in Hong Kong could not be simplistically flattened to the sheer exchange of legal documents, handshakes, and flags, nor the mere change of the government logo, administrative body, and national anthem.