Day: November 12, 2024

Speakers:
Christopher DeWolf, Managing Editor, Zolima CityMag
Billy Potts, Writer and Designer

Moderator:
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 6:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

When Henry Steiner moved to Hong Kong in 1961, it was only meant to be for nine months. More than 60 years later, he is the most important graphic designer in the city’s history. Henry Steiner’s Hong Kong, the first book in the new Zolimag Culture Guide series, explores the city through the lens of Steiner’s work, from the idea of East meets West, to the graphic identity of world-leading companies like HSBC, to Hong Kong icons like the Jockey Club, Hong Kong Land, Peak Tower, Ocean Terminal, Wellcome, Dairy Farm, Lane Crawford and more.

Christopher DeWolf has been writing about Hong Kong for nearly 20 years, earning a reputation as one of the city’s leading journalists on architecture, design, history and culture. The author of Borrowed Spaces: Life Between the Cracks of Modern Hong Kong (Penguin, 2017), DeWolf has been Zolima CityMag’s managing editor since its launch in 2015, and his award-winning work has also appeared in other magazines and books around the world including TIME, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Good Beer Hunting and Spacing.

Billy Potts is a Hong Kong-born writer and designer whose work offers a unique perspective shaped by his lifelong immersion in the city’s cultural landscape. His writing for Zolima CityMag explores the city’s hidden stories and design heritage, including traditional crafts, calligraphy and more. Potts’ in-depth design and research study on defunct and abandoned signage, Hong Kong Ghost Signs, has been backed by both the Design Trust and Lord Wilson Heritage Trust. Through his design studio Handsome Co., Potts has worked on projects involving Hong Kong’s iconic trams, the classic Camel flask and other renowned local brands including Cathay Pacific, Ascot Chang, and more. Billy has a Chinese-English background and is fluent in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.

This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and Zolima CityMag.

Speaker: James Marcus, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time
Venue: On Zoom

More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.

James Marcus is the author of Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2024) and Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut (2004). He edited and introduced Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage (2010) and has translated seven books from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova’s The Duel (2010). His essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, VQR, The American Scholar, The Atlantic, and many other publications. He is also the former editor of Harper’s Magazine, and currently teaches at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.