Co-presented with
Asia Art Archive
This two-part programme takes at its hinge Chungking Mansions, a building in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, made famous by Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express (1994). Chungking Mansions’ remarkably diverse population and status as a key business hub between Asia and Africa has led anthropologist Gordon Mathews to posit it as an alternate paradigm for the study of globalisation.
The first section features a screening of an excerpt from Bo Wang and Pan Lu’s collaboration Many Undulating Things (2019). The film’s third chapter, “Ferro Vitreous”, presents the contemporary state of Chungking Mansions in all its social and architectural complexities. Described as a political poem, the film concentrates on the circulatory system of Hong Kong, ultimately taking it as an archetype for other cities of globalised capitalism.
In the second part, panel speakers from the fields of art and architectural history, anthropology, and cultural studies discuss Chungking Mansions—from its beginnings in 1961 as a luxury residential development in Tsim Sha Tsui, to its current status as a centre of “low-end globalisation”.
Part I: Screening of excerpt from Many Undulating Things (dir. Bo Wang and Pan Lu, 2019), followed by a conversation with Bo Wang, Pan Lu, and Simon Soon
Time: 11:00am
Location: JC Cube
Part II: Panel with Roberto Castillo, Innocent Mutanga, Eunice Seng, and Ming Tiampo.
Moderator: Alice Jim
Time: 12:30pm
Location: Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists’ Book Library — Room 03-206, Barrack Block
This event will be conducted in English, with English to Cantonese simultaneous interpretation available.
Free and open to the public with registration.
Bo Wang
Bo WANG (b. 1982) is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. At his undergraduate, he studied physics and mathematics at Tsinghua University, Beijing, where he also got his Master's in cosmology. He later studied at School of Visual Arts in New York and received his MFA in photography, video and related media. As an artist, his works have been exhibited internationally, including venues like Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, Garage Museum in Moscow, Visions du Réel in Switzerland, Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, Essay Film Festival at ICA in London, DMZ Docs in South Korea, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Times Museum in Guangzhou, BOZAR in Brussels, among many others. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at ACC-Rijksakademie 2017–2018 as well as NTU CCA in 2016. He teaches in Visual and Critical Studies and Art History Department, School of Visual Arts, New York.
Dr. Pan Lu
Dr. PAN Lu joined the Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, as Assistant Professor in August 2015. Her research interests coalesce around the topic of cultural and cross-cultural analysis of various textual forms. She particularly specialises in topics concerning literature, film, visual culture and art, urban culture, creative industries and cities, modernity theories and cultural memory in modern and contemporary China, East Asia and Europe.
Pan studied in Shanghai, Bayreuth and Hong Kong. She was visiting scholar and visiting fellow at the Technical University of Berlin, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, researcher in residence at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and visiting scholar at Taipei National University of the Arts . She was also recipient of DAAD Scholarship, Li Ka Shing Prize for Best PhD Thesis, HKU, and Swire Scholarshipamong others. Meanwhile, Pan is also actively involved in film and art projects. Her artwork appeared in Urban Living Room, the 10th Shanghai Biennale and her on-going film project “Traces of an Invisible City” has received grants from DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, South Korea. She was also selected artist-in-residence at Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin, Germany (Oct–Dec, 2016). In 2018, her film (co-directed with Bo Wang) “Miasma, Plants and Export Painting” received Award of Excellence in Image Forum Festival, Tokyo, Japan.
Pan is author of two monographs: In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016) and Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2015). She is co-editor of the book Politics and Aesthetics of Creativity: City, Culture and Space in East Asia (Los Angeles and Hong Kong: Bridge 21). Her articles on various topics also appear in leading academic journals in cultural and visual studies such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Continuum, Public Art Dialogue, Creative Industries Journal, European Journal of East Asia Studies, Journal of Cultural Research, Landscape Architecture Frontiers, Journal of Visual Art Practice, Media Theory, etc.
Simon Soon
Simon Soon is a senior lecturer at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. His research focus includes nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and visual culture in Southeast Asia. Other research interests include global flows in art, architecture, and visual cultures of Asia (early modern, colonial, modern/contemporary), Latin American and Southeast Asian cultural networks and comparative frameworks, and abstraction and modernism in Asia and Africa. His doctoral dissertation investigated the spatio-visual practices of postwar left-leaning art movements in Singapore/Malaya, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines from the 1950s to 1970s. Prior to undertaking academic research, he worked as a curator in the field of Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art. Soon is co-founder and a member of the editorial collective of SOUTHEAST OF NOW: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a new peer-review journal published by NUS Press. He is also a team member of Malaysia Design Archive, an archival, research, and education platform on visual cultures of the twentieth century.
Roberto Castillo
Roberto Castillo is Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He has been living, working, and researching in the Asian region since 2006. He is also trained in journalism, international relations, political science, and history. In 2009, when he was working as an editor for a branch of Xinhua News Agency in Beijing, he became interested in the increasing presence of foreigners in China and their transnational connections. Since 2010, he has been carrying out cultural research on Africans in Guangzhou. He also administers the website Africans in China.
Innocent Mutanga
Innocent Mutanga is a Hong Kong-based Zimbabwean entrepreneur who champions social justice through raising awareness of the needs and conditions of the marginalised and the vulnerable in society. An anthropologist in the making, he has travelled to various developing countries, and in Hong Kong he is the co-founder of three social enterprises: The Wandering Voice, Africa Center Hong Kong, and Harmony HK. Through these efforts, he addresses issues faced by people of multiple disadvantaged identities such as refugees, female migrant domestic workers, non-Chinese sex workers, and LGBTQ ethnic minorities.
Eunice Seng
Eunice Seng is Associate Professor and Chair of the Departmental Research Postgraduate Committee in Architecture at the University of Hong Kong; and Principal of SKEW Collaborative Shanghai-Hong Kong. She is a founding member of Docomomo Hong Kong and co-director of the Singapore Institute of Architects Archifest 2017. An architect and architectural historian, her work explores interdisciplinary intersections and questions of agency in architecture. A forthcoming book, Resistant City: Histories, Maps and the Architecture of Development (2020) explores urban resilience and architecture’s complicit role in Hong Kong.
Ming Tiampo
Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature Art and Culture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is a scholar of transnational vanguardism. She is author of Gutai: Decentering Modernism (2011) and co-curated the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground (2013) at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In addition, Tiampo has published on globalisation and art, multiculturalism in Canada, and the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints. She is currently working on two books: Decentering Globalism is an interdisciplinary and methodological analysis of World Art Studies, while Paris from the Outside In: Art and Decolonization considers Paris as a site of intersection to investigate the historical conditions of global modernism. Her interests and expertise in global modernism and decolonisation are deeply relevant to this project.
Alice Jim
Alice Ming Wai Jim is Professor of Contemporary Art and University Research Chair in Ethnocultural Art Histories at Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. As an art historian, curator and cultural organizer, her research interests include contemporary ethnocultural and global art histories, media arts, international art exhibitions, and critical curatorial studies. In 2018, she co-edited the fall special issue of RACAR, “What is Critical Curating?” Recipient of the 2015 Centre de documentation d'Artexte Award for Research in Contemporary Art, Jim co-convened the 2019 Global Asia/Pacific Exchange (GAX), Asian Indigenous Relationalities in Contemporary Art, in Montreal. Her current research projects include the history of Asian Canadian art and Afro-Asian Indigenous futurist aesthetics.
