Abbas gives a very detailed analysis of architectural disappearance in aspects of culture and politics. He points out that the preservation could somehow lead to an anamorphic image, putting the culture under the gaze for visual consumption. To jump out of this hallucination, the need for culture identification is emphasised, yet, standing between the British and China, Hong Kong lacks independence, hence suffers from no self-identity. My experience of learning Conservation makes me confused about HK culture and HK architecture sometimes, which is well explained by this reading as architectural anonymity. We learnt cases of conserving declared monuments as well

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Films always act as a reflection of either a very true reality in the society, or an imaginary space filled with things that human wishes they were real. Being one of the cities with the highest building density, Hong Kong films, especially for those made during the 80s and 90, often features Hong Kong architecture as one of the main roles in films, depicting, as well as documenting this inter-national, para-sitic place, or to a certain extent stateless place. Moreover, what is more significant about movies is that this series of moving pictures can evoke different kinds of emotions from

Continue readingReading Response: Ackbar Abbas

Giving space to time, this is a politics of time and a symbol of postmodernism and also, this is what you can find through out the film Empire, “my films are just a way of taking up time.”.Just taking up time ,many people think that this kind of films are boring.Actually ,when you sit down and watch one of these films, you will find extremely serenity and relax, you will feel that the time flows slowly.This is what we actually need nowadays, as the process of modernization speeding up, there are fewer and fewer places for us to find the

Continue readingReading Response: Giuliana Bruno

Hong Kong can be a very confusing place. It has the past British colonial history but also an ever-growing Chinese influence. Indeed the city can be considered as stateless as this inter-national, para-sitic place has a strange blend of the East and West that cannot be found anywhere else. Perhaps is it this uncertainty in our identity that is in our core of our culture. The sense of uncertain and anxiety is amplified in many Hong Kong films for the 80s and 90s. The 80s and the 90s are often descripted as the “Golden Age” of Hong Kong, especially for

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Filming at the skyscraper for 8 hours and screened for 8 hours with 0 editing, Empire incarnates how architecture and time exists side by side and compliment each other and what’s more, how time is spatialized. The idea was abstract, vague and indescribable when it first came to my mind, yet turns out clear after some deliberation. Time spatializes movement in photos with multiple exposure, different frames of movement is displayed in one single picture while it works the same for film except that film is a series of photo stuck together. Same for Empire, the building is changing every

Continue readingReading Response:Giuliana Bruno

In Abbas’s book Hong Kong: Culture and the politics of disappearance, he presented the relationship between architecture and colonial history. What impressed me most is his argument of the preservation of old buildings.No matter intentionally or not, we attempt to preserve old buildings in sight, but unfortunately, the history these buildings represent is never in site. Simultaneously, with the disappearance of history, there’s suffering a loss of a critical sense of community. I have personally experienced this kind of feeling. In mainland China, there are kinds of ancient towns in rural areas that attract and fascinate tourists from domestic and

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The passage connects architecture and film with time. The writer demonstrates this relationship by illustrating light, weather and human movements which creates a space of architecture, an inner space that is unpredictable. Film freezes the moments of changes here, bringing out an abstract but modern technique—-“zero degree of cinema”. “no acting. But space acting out; no sets, but locations unraveling in reel time. Real stories of place.” I think “zero” means the distance between real time and photographic time, there is no compression or extension of time in a zero-degree cinema, in other words, “zero-time difference”. I think “Zero” might

Continue readingReading Response: Giuliana Bruno

Abbas’ literature strikes a chord with me strongly. The inappropriate preservation in Hong Kong made cultural conservation neither fish, flesh nor fowl. As the writer mentions, architecture is the first virtual confirmation of our city while it is also one of the most developed cultural forms in Hong Kong as well as cinema. However, they are also most dependent on the market so that they usually become commodity inevitably. Tai Kwun, as known as Central Police Station before, has been rebuilt as a tourist attraction and has become a popular space for “check-in”. It is full of stores and restaurants

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