Hong Kong Performs Itself | Dennis Zhou

The cityscape of Hong Kong, which grew over the course of two centuries from a fishing village to a colonial port to a gleaming metropolis and worldwide monetary heart, has lengthy confirmed onerous to visualise. In his basic 1997 examine Hong Kong: Tradition and the Politics of Disappearance, printed simply months earlier than the area’s handover from Britain to China, the previous College of Hong Kong professor Ackbar Abbas prompt that a part of the issue lay within the space’s perpetual standing as “not so much a space as a place of transit.”

Earlier than 1842, when the Qing Dynasty ceded the island to the British Empire on the finish of the First Opium Conflict, the world’s inhabitants was about seven and a half thousand folks. Over the succeeding many years, because the British leased first the neighboring Kowloon Peninsula after which the outlying New Territories, the increasing colony turned much less a vacation spot in and of itself than some extent to facilitate commerce, first between China and the remainder of the world and subsequently among the many many banks, delivery conglomerates, import-export firms, and different entities that arrange store within the free port. As old style, extractive imperialism morphed into extra nebulous types of world alternate, Hong Kong turned a testing floor for an emergent model of laissez-faire capitalism, applied by the British authorities and promulgated as “positive non-interventionism.” By 1980 Milton Friedman may declare of Hong Kong, “If you want to see how the free market really works, this is the place to come.”

The town’s skyline has all the time been unstable and indeterminate. The lead-up to the brand new millennium noticed a spree of property hypothesis. Builders demolished still-recent constructions and rebuilt them based on altering priorities and incentives, at the same time as waves of refugees and migrants—pushed by famines, battle, or financial alternative—wanted housing, nonetheless haphazardly assembled. Hong Kong’s structure has lengthy mixed cultural hybridity and temporal confusion, with conventional bamboo scaffolding adorning the perimeters of buildings designed by Norman Foster and different worldwide starchitects.

The territory’s politics have in current many years hardly been safer. The 1997 handover set a timeline that saved town in a state of suspension: underneath the “one country, two systems” mannequin, for 50 years, till 2047, residents of Hong Kong are imagined to retain the private and financial liberties they’d obtained as British topics. That sense of flux has in some respects grown extra acute since 2019, when protests swept town in response to a proposed regulation, later withdrawn, that may have allowed the extradition of suspected criminals from Hong Kong to the mainland.

Generations of Hong Kong filmmakers have labored to discover a cinematic language that would seize an setting so marked by contingency and ephemerality. In recent times, one notably authentic and sustained such effort has come from Chan Hau Chun, who has made a number of works blurring the boundaries between documentary and video artwork, and whose latest movie debuted at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery this summer time. An epistolary reflection on town, partly addressed to a then-imprisoned good friend, Map of Traces (2025) reveals fragments of Hong Kong’s collective historical past and varieties them into a picture of its current. “Memory,” she writes in a single letter displayed over a black background, “is like a hidden shape, waiting for the right moment to resurface.”

For many individuals probably the most recognizable pictures of Hong Kong nonetheless come from the Eighties and Nineties, when a wave of iconoclastic filmmakers—Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark—and martial arts stars like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee began making hyperstylized business options. Typically starring Cantopop idols, these movies tended to have pulpy plots that adopted recognizable however exaggerated style conventions, all filtered by means of antic, nearly music video–like aesthetics. Continuously they lavished consideration on the panorama of Hong Kong and paid shut consideration to the proximity of the licit and the illicit.

In Wong’s Chungking Categorical (1994), for instance, shot in twenty-three days on location within the Chungking Mansions housing improvement of Tsim Sha Tsui district and different native landmarks, one quick meals joint supplies the backdrop for likelihood encounters between law enforcement officials, gangsters, smugglers, drug mules, flight attendants, immigrants, expatriates, and town’s many different denizens. The movie’s kind encapsulated Hong Kong as a lot as its content material did. By slowing down the body fee and step-printing (duplicating frames to create a laggy impact), Wong and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, created a visible fashion—half slow-motion blurring, half jerky queasiness—that replicated the expertise of town’s hyperactivity.

In his e-book, Abbas argues that home audiences got here to need a extra particular type of Hong Kong tradition on the similar second that town’s relative independence felt threatened, creating an id rooted within the potential for its personal disappearance. It was throughout this era between Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 go to to Hong Kong, which led to the signing of the Sino–British Joint Declaration in 1984, and the official handover in 1997 {that a} recognizably Hong Kong aesthetic cohered: intensely business but idiosyncratic, stuffed with pop optimism but grounded in numerous traditions. Genres just like the romance, the wuxia, the gangster movie, and the police procedural had been prepared foundations from which to develop that aesthetic: filmmakers may draw on each obtained and native frameworks to create a vernacular that felt consultant of a metropolis caught between worlds. Shootouts may very well be modeled after Peking Opera choreography; martial-arts stars may confront neocolonial overlords.  

After 1997, nonetheless, a darker temper set in, obvious in movies like Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong, the primary impartial function to be launched after the handover. Made on leftover movie inventory, Chan’s function addressed related topics as, say, Chungking Categorical in a extra pessimistic, unvarnished vein, following alienated youth by means of town’s gang-infested public housing estates. An identical cynicism runs by means of Johnnie To’s Election movies, during which a triad’s political system mirrors that of latest Hong Kong, and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs trilogy (the idea for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed), during which an undercover police officer and a mole from the triads embedded within the police division have corresponding id crises as they attempt to ferret one another out.

Originally of the twenty-first century Hong Kong filmmakers discovered themselves in a modified sensible setting, with new incentives. After the signing of the Nearer Financial Partnership Association in 2003, coproductions between Hong Kong and mainland China turned extra viable. Many administrators moved both to Hollywood or the mainland, or each. After directing American blockbusters like Face/Off and Mission: Unattainable 2, John Woo helmed Pink Cliff, a mainland motion movie impressed by episodes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms; Wong’s most up-to-date challenge was his first tv collection, Blossoms Shanghai, an adaptation of the 2014 Chinese language novel Blossoms, by Jin Yucheng, and a coproduction with China Central Tv and the Chinese language tech conglomerate Tencent’s streaming service. The present, which got here out in China in 2023, captures the frenetic reopening of the inventory market in Nineties Shanghai, town of Wong’s start. In Hong Kong the exodus of those auteurs—mixed with business pressures and political stasis—drew native productions again to a safer imply, earlier than the political crises of the following decade additional restricted their room to maneuver.

What paths ahead stay, then, for filmmakers dwelling and dealing in Hong Kong right this moment? By approaching Hong Kong and its freighted identities from a distinct angle, eschewing the monumentality and style conventions of her predecessors in favor of a extra intimate, essayistic, and private fashion, Chan Hau Chun presents one perspective on how the territory seems to its residents now.

Like many in Hong Kong, she started her life elsewhere. Chan was born in a small village in Chaozhou in 1989, the second little one of an organized marriage between a father who had been working in Hong Kong as an undocumented laborer and a mom twenty years his junior. Partly as a result of she was an unsanctioned further little one underneath the One Little one Coverage, after her father returned to Hong Kong she needed to dwell with kin, neighbors, and foster households in numerous cities. She joined her father at twelve, alongside along with her mom and siblings, when he raised sufficient cash to get all of them permits. Rising up within the metropolis’s public housing estates, she picked up images as a youngster as a option to spend extra time away from a tough residence setting, earlier than finding out movie manufacturing on the Metropolis College of Hong Kong.

Her thesis challenge, 32+4 (2015), already exhibits a placing consciousness of how Hong Kong’s cramped infrastructure each shapes its residents’ home lives and displays the fraught trajectories that introduced so lots of them to town within the first place. The opening shot is of an atypical avenue seen by means of a window, earlier than the movie cuts to indicate Chan, perched on her mattress, blocking out the sunshine with black building paper. In diaristic narration—conveyed solely by means of onscreen textual content—Chan discusses how she got here to dwell on this area, one of many many subdivided flats (lofts partitioned into a number of tiny items) that present the remnants of reasonably priced housing within the metropolis. Her mom, she explains, left her father and married her stepfather quickly after arriving in Hong Kong—however all of them nonetheless dwell in the identical housing property, the place they share an elevator financial institution. A blurry nonetheless exhibits a second when Chan recorded her father and stepfather passing one another, probably unbeknownst to both of them; all through the movie Chan tries to interview her mom just for the older lady to defensively evade her questions concerning the previous.

As Chan movies herself—modifying the footage that may make it into 32+4, going by means of previous pictures doctored to take away Chan’s father, or discussing her ambivalence about recording her mother and father—she tries to piece collectively her household’s unstated historical past by different means. In a single scene she movies a dented door. It obtained that method, she explains, when her father attacked her mom with a meat cleaver. To take away it from view, her stepfather took it down from the lounge, turned it round, and put in it in her room, the place she needed to see it on daily basis. After sketching a picture of a girl onto the dented wooden, she covers up components of it with pictures from years earlier displaying her mom within the midst of a nervous breakdown—huddled bare within the bathe or wanting defensively into the digital camera—often cropped to go away the highest of her head or the bottoms of her ft unseen. The perimeters of Chan’s drawing fill within the lacking components of her shorn pictures, as if finishing them.

In contrast to Hong Kong New Wave auteurs, who principally targeted on public areas, websites of commerce, or governmental workplaces, Chan lingers all through her work on these types of claustrophobic home interiors. In 32+4 her handheld digital camera nearly by no means ventures outdoors, aside from a short journey along with her father to his ancestral village. There he lastly unburdens himself, admitting that he doesn’t know whether or not he ought to die in Hong Kong or on the mainland, discussing his years of onerous labor, and opening up about his emotions of betrayal over his divorce. Lastly he asks Chan to go judgment on whether or not he or her mom are accountable. “Why bother asking if it’s not about right or wrong?” he says. “What’s the interview about?”

Chan’s subsequent initiatives expanded from her fast household to town at massive, specializing in those who earlier portrayals of town tended to exclude. Looking Lau (2019) and Name Me Mrs. Chan (2017) profile a avenue artist and a custodian in an workplace tower, respectively, as one roams town and the opposite takes out countless luggage of trash. No Track to Sing (2017) juxtaposes scenes of mundane, city ennui with sexual fantasies and dream sequences in a vein that recollects the work of the Taiwan-based Malaysian-Chinese language filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, reducing from a scene of a person foraging for components on a avenue to a different man forlornly ready in a intercourse parlor or being whipped by a dominatrix, or a younger intercourse employee scrolling her cellphone in a duplicate subway automobile.

A room of many rooms (2024), edited from footage that Chan began amassing in 2019, facilities on residents of a subdivided flat whom Chan befriended. We see them mendacity in mattress, smoking, watching tv, enjoying on their telephones, discussing their every day routines or the swallows which have made a nest inside their constructing, in a collection of principally stationary photographs that each convey every individual’s confinement and attend patiently to how they curate their restricted area. One can see the affect of figures like Tsai, the Chinese language documentarian Wang Bing, and the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, not simply of their consideration to how the surreal and the fantastical leak out of the on a regular basis but additionally of their consolation with codecs that prioritize immediacy and intimacy. Like them, too, Chan has a sure skepticism about what facets of life a digital camera can totally seize, at the same time as she tries to doc the social actuality round her.

Her newest work, Map of Traces, additional develops her diarist’s-eye-view of Hong Kong. (I used to be invited to view the work in Hong Kong by Empty Gallery.) It opens on what seems to be like a nonetheless picture of figures in a park, their faces curiously blurred. After just a few moments the digital camera zooms, pans, after which begins shifting down the park lane in a distinctively jerky method that provides the sport away: we’re watching footage taken from Google Maps, handed by means of a grainy black-and-white filter. Quickly Chan and a good friend in London begin narrating their “walk” as a cursor blinks on and off. They put the map’s operate to endearingly impractical ends, tilting the vantage as much as see the foliage of a banyan tree throughout a dialog about why such timber can’t take root within the harsh climes of England. Nostalgia is mediated by means of surveillance know-how: because the pair focus on previous pop songs and folks sayings and stroll down Nathan Highway (named after Hong Kong’s thirteenth colonial governor) and previous Prince Edward Station, it turns into clear that Chan’s good friend lives in exile and will by no means return to Hong Kong. “I just don’t know how to make sense of what’s going on in this world,” she says. “I’m desperate to find meaning in all of this.”

The movie takes its construction from letters that Chan wrote to a different good friend, C.R., whereas he was confined to a detention facility for his position within the 2019 protests. The textual content, which flashes silently onscreen at intervals, mixes poetic musings with sensible affairs. Chan responds to C.R.’s updates about studying guitar in his cell; she shares footage of herself exploring the hill behind his facility and a mobile phone video of two folks holding fingers throughout the aisle of a prepare carriage.

Additionally interspersed all through are fragments of footage that Chan shot of the 2019 protests. A scene of a musical motion—protesters enjoying trombones and clarinets in a park—performs with out quantity, aside from the remoted, plaintive sound of a girl blowing on a blade of grass; fuzzy pictures depict what is perhaps figures tending to a hedge, till we understand that they’re stripping protest flyers from its branches. The end result isn’t a lot elegiac as defiantly evasive. One man, the protagonist from Looking Lau, describes getting arrested after surveillance cameras captured him writing a personality related to the protests on a metropolis wall. Now he makes use of water, which the cameras can’t choose up, to tag buildings round Hong Kong together with his seemingly innocuous drawings: a smiling sunflower, spindly-rayed suns, goofy cat-like creatures. 

“Lately I’ve wandered through many places in my dreams,” Chan writes to C.R. in one among her letters. “Sometimes I catch glimpses of you there, but more often, it’s just empty landscapes. Like a city that both exists and doesn’t exist, hovering between presence and absence.” Map of Traces appears much less in ascribing a single id to Hong Kong than in capturing how town’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy themselves, their very own methods of representing the area and their relationship to it—exactly what typically will get squeezed out of the discourse about its future. On this sense Chan’s movies current one option to lastly see Hong Kong the best way it sees itself. To start with of Map of Traces, as she and her good friend traverse town by means of Google Maps, the photographs begin blurring collectively, racing by means of crowds with anonymized faces and previous avenue indicators, storefronts, and nearly summary surroundings in a method that appears to mirror an uncontainable sense of time flying by, earlier than the movie settles on one element: a pedestrian site visitors sign lined with a trash bag, damaged throughout the protests after which faraway from sight.