Perhaps one of the most striking parallels between architecture and film is that they both reconstruct a hallucination of the bygone things. The illusory memories, like the metaphor in the architectural forms of Flagstaff House or Pei’s Bank of China Tower, are repeatedly reproduced after the real history has vanished and ironically becomes part of Hong Kong’s identity. Over twenty years ago, Abbas wrote about the disappearance of Hong Kong, or its false images through relentless urban renewal and chaotic architectural styles. Two decades on, it seems that the continuously intensifying marketization, the architectural anonymity, and even the anxiety of identity itself have joined the ghosts of preserved colonial remnants as the new reincarnation of Hong Kong’s spirit. Has Hong Kong disappeared? Maybe it has. Or maybe it is the Ship of Theseus, whose consistent existence is nothing more than illusions, and these illusions, along with the disappeared memories, have become themselves.
Shizheng LIANG, 3035834785
I have enjoyed your poetic reflection on disappearance. Abbas has developed a thought-provoking understanding of disappearance that is not limited to physical disappearance. Perhaps one way to handle disappearance is to acknowledge or even play with the idea of disappearance. Is this tactic still applicable today, as the writing is from 1997?
Thanks for the comments！ I really agree with your idea of dealing with disappearance by acknowledging or playing it. That is basically what I wanted to indicate by the Ship of Theseus, that perhaps disappearance was never a bad thing or a destructive process, but it’s actually a process of reconstructing. By that, I mean that in Hong Kong, disappearance itself has to some extent become a part of its culture. Everything’s fading away and nothing can be taken back. The sense of precariousness. And I do feel like this concept is still applicable for today, of course in a border sense, but as long as our city is still “metabolizing”, I guess the process won’t stop.