Month: October 2024

Speaker: Victor Fan, Reader in Film and Media Philosophy, Department of Film Studies, King’s College London

Moderator: Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

Lam Nin-tung’s (林年同) ‘The Spatializing Consciousness of Chinese Cinema’ [中國電影的空間意識, 1983] has long been considered an article on the aesthetics specific to Chinese cinema. Published before the emergence of film philosophy as a field of study, Lam’s ambitious and truly original proposal to rethink the cinematographic image as a spatializing consciousness has been grossly overlooked by his peers. For Lam, even though the cinema is technologically and ideologically configured according to the European theory of perspective, Chinese filmmakers have long experimented with spatializing the relationship between the spectator’s body and the image, via the technē of camera perception, by layering views of reality onto a two-dimensional frame. In so doing, Lam sees the cinematographic image-consciousness as a process of jing-you (鏡游 or mirroring-journeying), one that challenges the anthropocentric understanding of cinematographic perception. His film philosophy, Fan argues, addresses the shortcomings of the binary notion of subject-object divide and deconstructs the relation between film semiotics and aesthetics.

Lam’s contribution to film philosophy does not stop at proposing a groundbreaking understanding of the cinematographic image as consciousness before and separately from European film phenomenology and Deleuze’s two cinema books. He also decolonizes film studies by building an episteme that puts into consideration Chinese film history, aesthetic debates, as well as Daoist and Buddhist philosophies. This talk is developed out of a collaborative project between Fan and Liu Siqi to translate Lam’s magnum opus into the English language. Through a line-by-line scrutiny of his writing, key concepts, as well as the archival and scholarly references he uses, they unearth and reconstruct Lam’s highly systematic method. In this talk, Fan discusses not only Lam’s philosophy itself but also the process of translation as epistemic reconstruction.

Victor Fan is Reader in Film and Media Philosophy at the Department of Film Studies, King’s College London and a film festival consultant. Fan graduated with a Ph.D. from Yale University and an MFA at School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism (University of Minnesota Press, 2022). His articles have also been published in peer-review journals including World Picture Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Screen, Film History: An International Journal, and many other edited volumes. His film The Well was an official selection of the São Paolo International Film Festival; it was also screened at the Anthology Film Archives, the Japan Society and the George Eastman House.

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Speaker: Lory Wong, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, HKU
Respondent: Cecilia L. Chu, School of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Moderator: Dan Vukovich, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 1069, 10/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

The Colonial Sanitary Engineer, Osbert Chadwick’s 1882 Reports on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong is the first significant document on Hong Kong’s sanitary state. The reports prompted regulations to improve sanitary infrastructure and the creation of the Sanitary Board. As a result, many modern historical narratives have referenced Chadwick’s reports, with some magnifying its Eurocentric and classist perspectives associating the East and the poor as filthy, and the West as clean and modern.

This talk challenges the aforementioned Eurocentric and classist portrayals of the Chinese and Europeans in Chadwick’s reports by scrutinizing the internal contradictions in his document, before offering comparatively less biased perspectives of alternative archival sources which have been sidelined by modern historical narratives. The talk is based on a part of my PhD chapter examining the distorted lens in which many colonial officials viewed the Chinese, the spaces they occupied in the lead up to the 1894 plague, the outbreak itself, and the ways in which these perspectives guided the colonial government’s handling of Taipingshan. My doctoral thesis aims to challenge the popular traditional historiographical narratives of the 1894 plague in Hong Kong and offer alternative ways to understanding the event.

Lory Wong is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Hong Kong history, Hong Kong culture and literature, Postcolonial Studies, and the Medical Humanities.

Cecilia L. Chu is an Associate Professor and Director of the MPhil-PhD Programme in the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Trained as an urban historian with a background in design and conservation, her works focus on the social and cultural processes that shape the forms and meanings of built environments and their impacts on local communities. She is the authorofthe award-winning book, Building Colonial Hong Kong: Speculative Development and Segregation in the City, which received the 2023 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award from the Urban History Association and the 2024 International Planning History Society Book Prize. Her other book publications include The Speculative City: Emergent Forms and Norms of the Built Environment (2022) and Hong Kong Built Heritage (forthcoming 2025).

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Speaker: Nianshen Song (宋念申), Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University

Respondents:
Loretta Kim, Associate Professor and Head, School of Modern Languages and Culture, HKU
Ji Li, Associate Professor, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, HKU

Moderator: Daniel Vukovich, Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Friday, October 4, 2024
Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower

This event will take the form of a seminar/discussion with Professor Nianshen Song (宋念申) of Tsinghua University (清華大學人文社會科學高等研究院), about his new book project, The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City. Select chapters will be sent to registered HKU participants. The discussion will be led by Professors Loretta Kim and Li Ji of HKU (SMLC), and moderated by Professor Dan Vukovich (SoH).

The Neighborhood is a nearly-400-year history of a small urban space, which examines the trans-regional political, religious, and economic forces that shaped and reshaped a frontier city and people’s life. Xita (West Stupa) is a thriving commercial neighborhood in Shenyang, the largest city in Northeast China. Its story began in 1643 when the Qing emperor erected a Tibetan-Buddhist stupa in the old city’s western suburb. During the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), Xita was a landmark of the political/spiritual alliance between the Manchu, Mongols, and Tibetans. In the early twentieth century, colonial powers (first Russia then Japan) and local warlords constructed competing railways that intersected in Xita, turning it into an urban center which manifested the intensified cross-continental geopolitical competition. During the Japanese colonial period, Xita was a symbol of Japan’s pan-Asianist empire, while it at the same time developed into one of the largest Korean diasporic enclaves in urban China. In the 1990s, when Shenyang, socialist China’s capital of heavy industry, turned into a “rust city,” Xita surprisingly flourished. Due to Korean investment and government propagation, it transformed into a peculiar consumerist and entertainment quarter in a largely de-industrialized metropolis. The story of Xita unfolds the nuanced interactions between state, people, and urban space in imperial, colonial, nationalist, socialist, and post-socialist contexts.

Nianshen Song is Professor at the Tsinghua Institute of Advanced Studies, affiliated with the Department of History, Tsinghua University. Before returning to Beijing in 2021, he taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research and teaching focus on late imperial and modern China from global and regional perspectives, with special interests in China’s ethnic frontiers, East Asian trans-regional networks, historical geography, urban studies, and historical geography. He is the author of Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2018 and Zhizao Yazhou [制造亚洲 Mapping Asia] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2024). His journal articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Inner Asia, Geopolitics, Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Science), and Kaifang shidai, among others.

This event is co-organised by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies (CHAGS) Cross-Faculty Research Hub and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, The University of Hong Kong.

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