The Question of Hong Kong: Experimental Media Arts in a Space of Disappearance

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In 1997, Ackbar Abbas published Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance—his exploration of a Hong Kong subjectivity emerging from its new cultural forms of cinema, photography, writing, and architecture. This paper extends Abbas’s project to examine the esthetic strategies and spatial tactics born from a culture of disappearance two decades following the city’s change of sovereignty. I examine three works: Yip Yuk-Yiu’s Another Day of Depression in Kowloon City, Anson Mak’s On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing, Lo Yin Shan’s Driving Lantau: Whisper of an Island, focusing on the formation of an audiovisual language from interactions with architectural spaces and physical terrains. The inquiry asks: What is the reciprocal relationship between this language developed from technological mediums and cultural materials, and the city of Hong Kong? How can experimental media arts create textured maps for orienting oneself in a space of disappearance?