Second Essay Research: Made in Hong Kong by Fruit Chan

I know, I know, I'm a blogpost down and so we shall skim over that detail, and hope that I remember in the next week that I need to top up...

So this blogpost is actually cheating a bit because I'm going to call it research; I find it much easier having something to 'talk to', if you like, rather than feeling weird writing informally on a word document.

By way of finding something 'visual' to grasp on to for this essay, I thought that watching some films would be a great way to put myself within a time and space in Hong Kong so that I can get a feel for the atmosphere. The main thing I wanted to avoid was anything too 'Hollywood' if you like, as of course Hong Kong cinema has had a remarkable global enthusiasm. But I was looking for something that could speak about life in small spaces, in a time of anxiety that could in some ways, be honest. Some of the reading I had been doing recommended Fruit Chan's Handover Trilogy, which turns out to be some legendary Hong Kong independent cinema. Most importantly, it was specifically commenting on the anticipation of the 1997 handover (hence its title) in the 'present', i.e. Made in Hong Kong, the first of the trilogy, was released in October of that year.

In terms of space, and the visualisation of a HK space in particular, cinema is a way to observe a dramatized version of this space. It nevertheless, can tell valuable narratives, not only in the physicality of the space (hyperdensity, the crossover of public and private in the ‘home’, establishing what ‘home’ looks and feels like in HK) but also the atmosphere, the tension, the relationships held and let go of, in the interiors of the space. What I have found frustrating so far is the lack of these sorts of sources, and thus outside of personal and interpersonal experience, cinema is ideal for showing a critique of this space, especially in a film like Made in Hong Kong, with Chan's cinematic style that is supposedly considered 'realistic' in comparison to the dramatic, globally successful triad/corruption-focused, showdowns. Okay, Made in Hong Kong still has these elements too, but it isn't simply good-versus-evil.

Made in Hong Kong shows several things about HK which I myself have not had experience of. Alongside my parents' description of their childhood apartments, having the visual in the filming in a real apartment really put across the way people lived together. Although the units seem to only have tow or three family members living inside, the apartments were/are so so so so small. Few solid doors were opened or closed; instead were just gates or sliding curtains or flimsy, plastic sliding doors. The way the movie was filmed inside the apartments in terms of cinematography was clearly also restricted, often choosing very close shots or shots framed with doorways and furniture, no doubt because of the limitations of the space anyway. Far away from the vast apartments on the Cantonese soaps that frequent HK television, these units feel cramped, bleak and incredibly ordinary (so lived in and chaotic, yet ordered in its own way) that you can't help but feel you have entered something so unashamedly real. Coming out of the apartment, the housing estate is an endless vertical cavern, interconnected with tunnels of concrete, not unlike a multi-storey car parked; It feels like a place where people are 'stored' only for a few hours, but at the same time, its prison-like too. All the same, the characters don't come across as 'trapped' by the architecture as such, but more lost. Outside of the estate, there are few points in the movie where you can come up for air from the urban landscape. Only two spaces feel open: the rooftop of a building, facing a huge cross, where at the beginning of the film an anonymous teen girl commits suicide by jumping; and a view over a mountain-side cemetery, where the three protagonists call out the girl's name into the foggy distance. The message here seem clear that there is no way out, that fighting the way of life is futile and will only result in death. It is not the architecture that keeps everyone in, but life itself.

The characters and storyline are similarly cynical. The main protagonist loses all of his family, his friends and all purpose in life. He can't even succeed as a bad-guy, failing to even to avenge the deaths of his loved ones. It is only at the brink of madness that he is capable of killing, and then ending his own life, fulfilling the prophecy that Chan seems to be making. Any dream of happiness, wealth, success, escape is very swiftly extinguished. Of course it is biased, exaggerated and sombre, the vision of a young aspirational director in Hong Kong, but what it does show is this other side. It may be 'gritty' and hard hitting, but I don't feel that it pretends to be a flashy action movie showing slummy apartments as the backdrop, nor does it give a glossy, saccharine finish on HK life, as though there exists a Hongkongese dream. I hope to use this film with a pinch of salt. But it does give a great insight into the life and lifestyle of HK people in very recent history, with a view of the impending 'doom' that they fear in Chinese rule.

Botticelli Reimagined Review

Venus after Botticelli by Yin Xin

Sorry for another late blog, but alas, some weekends are not meant to be, especially coming down after the WIPS and crawling back up again. The WIPs went pretty well (as some of you from my course might know) and it seems to be just a case of cracking on which, of course, I have been struggling to do thanks to all the other exciting things that I can't let go of...Such is life. I'm telling myself that tomorrow will be the day, and I will work from home so that I don't get distracted.

In the meantime, I thought I would quickly whiz through my thoughts of the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition (lots of reimagining going on, don't you think?). In spite of my busy-ness, somehow I told myself I had time to do this on the opening day with Chris and Hannah. I'll be frank - I thought that they had overdone it and lots of bits felt like fillers, probably because it is in the biggest  exhibition space at the V&A. As a 'modernist' though, I loved a lot of the first room holding the 'Reimagined' bit, and much of it was incredibly impressive, sometimes accidental, interpretations of Venus, and it had a lot of potential for interesting debates around gender, sexuality, the sexed gaze, beauty, etc. etc. and yet, I personally was disappointed with the texts on the walls and descriptions of the works. But for now, I'll talk about the pieces I liked.

There were two stand out pieces for me, which immediately made me think about how the beauty portrayed in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus has penetrated contemporary visual media; the first is an outstanding painting by Yin Xin, which of course caught my eye as one of the few Asian artists involved in a very Euro-centric (of course) exhibition. Obviously, Venus portrays a Caucasian ideal of beauty, but I found this one of the most captivating pieces in the whole exhibition and wished there was more content or context so that it could really push its agenda. From Yin Xin's series After, which is a series of paintings that visually changes figures from very famous European paintings to ethnic Chinese, clearly Yin is trying to problematise this historic conception of European female beauty, magnified and idealised in these idols portrayed by European men. I felt like more emphasis would have globalised 'Reimagining' much more clearly than what had been shown.

The other was a display of two photographs by Rineke Dijkstra from her series of Beach Portraits, which apparently was not intended to look like interpretations of Venus. There is a beautiful innocence to these pictures, especially the one I have included below. The poses of the two girls are strikingly close to the painted pose of Botticelli's Venus, and does make you question where these influences, if any come from. Clearly in Venus it is a male gaze (Botticelli) forming a female figure with a combination of sexuality and youth. But I feel the intention here is different, and I think it makes you think about Venus herself as an adolescent girl, on the cusp of...something - it is neither womanhood or adulthood or even girlhood. I feel like the two photographs really revealed something about our gaze as an audience of young girls, a very contentious subject which the Dijkstra didn't seem to intend. Yet in the context of the exhibition, it brings out these very complicated relationships between the historic and contemporary views of girls and of ourselves. 

After that, I wasn't massively impressed until the end room with two studies of Venus, two beautiful luminous, full body portraits of her. What was fantastic was being able to compare the two studies, noticing a fuller body, a different hairstyle, the slight tilt of the arm or the leg, which you never get to see with such famous paintings. Its great to see a process, maybe a 'vulnerability' in a work in progress, from what seems like a man who is intent on a specific beauty.

Beach Portraits by Rineke Dijkstra

Second Term Essay: Hong Kong's outdoor dining

In preparation for the WIPs next week, perhaps its relevant to introduce my research topic, although I'll keep enough back so that all of you from my course won't get bored on Wednesday afternoon....

For this essay, we have to follow a design change or development through a critical historiography, which is in itself a difficult thing to grasp. It is a much less tangible task than the first essay, as of course we could always come back to our object if we veered off course but this topic was much harder to pin down. We had to choose a time period and location to cut down on the crazy amount of material we might potentially have to deal with.

I at least knew that I wanted to focus on Hong Kong, which visibly has had a significant change in the landscape in recent years, so something must have happened. So I decide the best thing would be to ask my parents. It seemed that they were in a good position to identify the everyday changes that had taken place in the last few years, as they had had some distance with the place, but visited often enough that they could see the smaller effects of the bigger picture. They felt (as food is of course, very important whenever we visit) that the most noticeable change was the decline in a kind of eating place called a dai pai dong, a very informally set up restaurant that feature fold up tables and plastic stools, and serve up a small selection of heart seasonal dishes. No fuss, but always great food. These venues serve up breakfast, lunch and dinner, or also the late afternoon snack with a Hong Kong milk tea or a can of coke.  They suggested the area of Mong Kok in Kowloon, as a place that I recognise myself, but also as an important consumption district in Hong Kong. These were not only a big part of the growing up of my parent's generation, but also pepper my own memory of Hong Kong. I also wanted to include the street food hawker in the conversation about dai pai dong, as in my view there is something about them that really relate. They serve similar foods, have similar kinds of patrons and occupy the same kinds of spaces in Hong Kong. Both have a temporality that I don't recognise in other kinds of eating venues in Hong Kong.

This had all changed a lot even since I had been born, so I chose my time period as between 1997 until now, knowing that the handover from Britain to China is a crucial point in Hong Kong history. Naïvely, I had only really chosen it to be a consistent politics but of course this has really developed with learning more and more about the political landscape of both China and Hong Kong at that time. 

In early February, I thought my design change would be relatively obvious, focusing on the street and change in urban planning. I felt like this was already a pretty expansive topic with plenty of challenges for me to practice dealing with. But then the day after the proposal hand-in, riots broke out over the police removal of street vendors in Mong Kok. From the riot, and previous protest activity in Mong Kok, it clarifies that these streets and its activity is much more that the change in urban planning. The change is also in the people; they are further vocalising their feeling towards government changes to their territories and therefore their identities. Food is essential to the everyday life of Hong Kong people, and it is clear that the way in which they eat together, often at these informal outdoor venues, are a huge part of their collective identity. It really shook me that I had chosen something that was so current, and I think I worried that I didn't know enough to talk about this coherently and intellectually. Further research and just finding as many sources as possible, and talking to some specialists on Hong Kong and markets has really helped though to settle that insecurity, and so hopefully this week's presentation I can get some feedback in how I'm dealing with it so far. 

It's still unclear how I'm going to structure this so that it is easy to understand through design history, but hopefully this will come with more time with my material. I feel like I also have the advantage of my parents, in that they, and myself, have first hand experience of these social gatherings around dai pai dong and how it has effected even our experience of Hong Kong. Spatial issues are of course intrinsic to the workings of a city, and perhaps is even more magnified in the special conditions that Hong Kong is under, not only tiny, but also with such a specific historic relationship with two different countries and cultures.

Fingers crossed for me on Wednesday! Hopefully this is a satisfying taster (couldn't help it) for the essay to come!