[READING RESPONSE] ACKBAR ABBAS

The article poses the following questions to me: what shapes our cultural identity? A blend of the east and the west? Or the most local indigenous culture recalling back to the days Hong Kong as a small fishing village? What I have come up with at last is that all the past of the place altogether brings about this unique culture. This then raises the importance of Hong Kong’s cultural self-definition which is closely related to its architecture.

Hong Kong, as an inter-national and para-sitic city, is unsurprisingly struggling with the problem of hyperdependency which thwarts its way to find its own representation. The placeless and anonymous architecture driven by socio-economic factors turns Hong Kong into a so-called one-dimensional character, a culture of disappearance. Yet sometimes disappearance of an object does not literally mean it disappears. Like a life cycle, something emerges and replaces with time. Who then could judge this reappearance process?

Wong Lok Yu Angel 3035794375

1 thought on “[READING RESPONSE] ACKBAR ABBAS

  1. Putri Santoso says:

    One of the key takeaways from Abbas’ article is that the notion of “disappearance/appearance” cannot be seen separately and always comes in pair (which you demonstrated well here). He also mentions that “… a space of disappearance has specific local and historical references, which makes it possible to conceptualize it in several other ways as well” (p.70). It would be interesting to also dive deeper into the dialogue between what you meant by “cultural self-definition” and the disappearance, for example: what would the hyper dependency mean to Hong Kong’s cultural self-identification?

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