Speaker:Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Lam Wong Yiu Wah Chair Professor of Visual Studies, Lingnan University
Moderator:Jean Ma, Mr. and Mrs. Hung Hing-Ying Professor in the Arts, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2025 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: CRT-7.30, 7/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
How do we investigate the reception of existing film canons a century ago? For instance, which of the most prestigious silent films were shown in Hong Kong? How were these films exhibited and received locally? What role does digital scholarship play in such an investigation? Noting the inclusion and exclusion of films that were once popular (or not) into our current film canons, a list of ‘classic’ silent titles from Europe, America, and China was made to test the canon in the Hong Kong context. The list was subsequently checked/verified by the aggregated data from the two digital archives on early Hong Kong film exhibition. The findings show that early films screened in Hong Kong did not match, to a large extent, the canonical history of either global or Chinese cinemas. The gap might be related to stars, the track records of directors and studios, the colonial distribution circuits, and choices of the exhibitors. In closing, I will consider other likely gaps in digital archives and the limitations of digital historiography.
Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh is Lam Wong Yiu Wah Chair Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her work examines the aesthetic, institutional, and economic dimensions of cinema, film culture, and media industry. In the past decade, she focused on producing new materials for the study of early cinema and has published two online databases, several articles, and three edited volumes: EarlyFilm Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Republican China (University of Michigan Press, 2018); Beyond Shanghai: New Perspectives on Early Chinese Cinema (Beijing UP, 2016); and Rethinking Chinese Film Industry: New Methods, New Histories (Beijing UP, 2010). Her most recent works are 32 New Takes on Taiwan Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2022, with Darrell Davis and Wenchi Lin) and The Colonial Screen: Early Cinema in Hong Kong (Oxford University Press, 2025).
This event is co-organised by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and the School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
This public premiere of the exclusive Director’s Cut of Eileen’s Discourse is a multimedia tribute to the Chinese writer Eileen Chang. Acclaimed composer Professor Chan Hing-yan has joined forces with director Oliver Shing to create a music video, featuring Chan’s original score set to Chang’s evocative prose, and visualized by Shing’s sumptuous cinematic narrative that reimagines Chang’s themes in iconic Hong Kong locations.
Professor Nicole Huang, the project’s literary consultant, will join Chan and Shing in a three-way conversation to explore the creative thinking behind this unique convergence of music, film, and literature. We will also feature a live demonstration of excerpts from the music score, performed by acclaimed mezzo-soprano Samantha Chong, who has lent her voice to the film’s soundtrack.
Chan Hing-yan (Composer) Chan Hing-yan is the James Chen and Yuen-Han Chan Professor in Music at the University of Hong Kong, where he also serves as Head of the School of Humanities. Renowned for his mastery in blending Chinese and Western musical elements, his works have been performed at major arts festivals around the world. To date, Professor Chan has composed five Chinese-language chamber operas, establishing himself as one of the most prominent figures in this genre, both locally and across the Chinese-speaking world. He is the recipient of the “Best Artist Award (Music)” at the 2013 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. His collaborations with the City Contemporary Dance Company earned him critical acclaim and a Hong Kong Dance Award in 2008, when he was also commended under the Secretary for Home Affairs’ Commendation Scheme for “Persons with Outstanding Contributions to the Development of Arts and Culture.”
Oliver Shing (Director) A graduate from the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Oliver is an Image Designer, Creative and Visual Director. He is a founding member of Heteroglossia Theatre and has collaborated with numerous organisations, including Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, Hong Kong Arts Festival, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong Dance Company, Wuji Ensemble, Chung Ying Theatre Company, Zuni Icosahedron, City Contemporary Dance Company, Hong Kong Ballet, Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, On & On Theatre Workshop and Theatre Ronin.
Oliver is the founder of the multimedia studio DAAIMUNG and has contributed to exhibition visual designs for The Hong Kong Museum of History, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Palace Museum and Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence. He has also worked on concert visuals for artists such as Nicholas Tse, Hins Cheung, Mirror, Aaron Kwok, Ian Chan, Leo Ku, Chan Fai Young and Kay Tse.
Supported by the Arts Capacity Development Funding Scheme (ACDFS) of the Home Affairs Bureau, Oliver planned and created the large-scale architectural projection project ‘Light Construction City’, producing projection works ‘Weaving Tales’ and ‘Old Normal’ at Nan Fung Textile Factory and The HKFYG Leadership Institute (formerly Fanling Magistracy). In 2023, he participated in Tai Kwun’s InnerGlow projection show as co-creative director.
黃心村 (文學顧問) Nicole Huang (Literary Consultant) Nicole Huang is a Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison for seventeen years before joining HKU in 2017. She is the author of Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden, 2005) and Hong Kong Connections: Eileen Chang and Worldmaking (Hong Kong, 2022), and the co-editor of Written on Water (a collection of essays by Eileen Chang, New York, 2023). Her recent work engages visual and auditory culture of contemporary China, with a forthcoming monograph on a culture of listening in late-Mao China. She is currently working on a book project that situates the writer Eileen Chang on a relational map of world literature.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Eileen Chang’s Legend (a collection of short stories titled Chuanqi in Chinese) depicts the glamour and sorrow of human life, showing lovers in urban settings who still “connect with nature” and even “become like animals.” In her stories, phrases like “red rose turning into mosquito blood” represent how men belittle and objectify their wives in marriage; images such as the “butterfly specimen” and “bird on a screen” highlight the helplessness of women in controlling their own fates; and the “tear-like moon” creates a somber mood. These natural symbols are deeply tied to the struggles and emotions of women. As ecofeminism suggests, the fates of gender and nature are not separate but are closely linked within historical and cultural dynamics.
This seminar will use an ecofeminist perspective to revisit the natural and animal imagery in Eileen Chang’s works, examining how they reflect women’s emotions, bodies, and destinies. It will also consider the influence of Chang’s writing on modern literature, including the speaker’s own writing experiences.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 程皎暘 作家、品牌策劃師、香港大學MALCS傑出校友。已出版小說集《打風》、《飛往無重島》、《烏鴉在港島線起飛》及《危險動物》，得到《明報》、《亞洲週刊》、「澎湃」、中國新聞網等多家媒體推薦，並被中國現當代文學館、紐約布魯克林公共圖書館、新加坡國家圖書館等收藏；獲香港青年文學獎、《廣州文藝》「都市小說雙年展」新人獎，入圍台灣時報文學獎等；作品《香港快車》入選「2024青鳥作家導演起飛」計劃；擔任「城市文學獎2026」、「2024-2025蒲公英聯校文學獎」等比賽評審。
CHENG Jiaoyang A writer, brand strategist, and distinguished alumnus of the MALCS program at the University of Hong Kong, has published short story collections including Typhoon, Flying to Weightless Island, Crows Take Off on the Island Line, and Dangerous Animals. These works have been recommended by numerous media outlets such as Ming Pao, Asia Weekly, The Paper, and China News Service, and have been collected by institutions including the National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, the Brooklyn Public Library in New York, and the National Library of Singapore. Cheng has received the Hong Kong Youth Literary Awards and the Newcomer Awards at the Guangzhou Literature and Art “Urban Fiction Biennial Exhibition,” and was shortlisted for the Taiwan Times Literary Awards. The work Hong Kong Express was selected for the “2024 Qingniao Writer Directors Takeoff” program. Cheng also serves as a judge for competitions such as the “City Literary Awards 2026” and the “2024-2025 Dandelion Joint School Literary Award.”
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker:Summer Kim Lee, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles
Moderator:Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, November 14, 2025 Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (6:00 pm/13 Nov/Los Angeles) Venue: On Zoom
In this talk, Summer Kim Lee presents work from her book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (Duke UP, 2025), which engages with contemporary Asian American artists who challenge expectations that their work should repair the wounds of racial trauma. Recent Asian American cultural production has been praised for being healing, nurturing, and therapeutic—for “feeling Asian” and feeling good. Why is this what we want from our cultural objects? What is being expected from Asian American artists? What assumptions are we making about what processes of repair should feel like? By turning to the “spoiled”—what the racialized, gendered body consumes, wrecks, and inflicts in its desire and excess—Kim Lee looks to the work of Asian American artists who attend to the painful, destructive dimensions of repair, as integral to the kinds of healing Asian Americans seek.
Summer Kim Lee is an assistant professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. She specializes in feminist and queer theory, performance studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and Asian American art and culture. Her first book, Spoiled: Asian American Hostility and the Damage of Repair (2025) is out with Duke University Press. Some of her published work can be found in ASAP/Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Post45, and Social Text.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker:Samia Henni, Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University
Respondent:Alexandre Mecattaf, COLLECTIVE Studio Moderator:Daniel Elam, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: On Zoom
In the 1960s the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs, and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara. This secret, still-classified programme, which occurred during and after the Algerian War (1954–1962), is the subject of architectural historian Samia Henni’s recent monograph Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara. Meticulously culled together from numerous sources, the publication‘s wealth of materials documenting the violent history of France’s activities in the Algerian desert offers a rich repository for all those concerned with histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social, and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.
Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024), and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2023–25),Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020).Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Eileen Chang’s writing inherits the narrative tradition of popular novels since the late Qing dynasty, such as The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai and Xiepu chao (Tides of the Huangpu River). Her plots often feature everyday activities that portray the lives of Shanghai’s urbanites, with photo-taking being a prime example. While previous scholarship on Chang’s relation to visual culture has largely focused on “the technologized visuality” or “cinematic narration,” a return to the texts themselves reveals that concrete actions—taking, “reading,” and collecting photographs—play a central role. In her later work Dui Zhao Ji (Looking at Old Photos), Chang revisits her own life through photographs, just as her fictional characters repeatedly gaze at and interpret them. These seemingly mundane acts not only drive the narrative but also profoundly shape interpersonal dynamics and emotional networks.
This lecture explores how, in Chang’s fiction, photographs transcend their role as mere representational tools to become “everyday objects” that actively intervene in relationships and structure the emotional order. Through close readings of various texts, I will delineate how the acts of photographing, collecting, and viewing photos construct a web of “attachment” and “indifference” that subtly defines intimacy and distance. Furthermore, as “reading photos” becomes a quintessential modern experience, how does it engender a new aesthetic sensibility? The process of gazing at a photograph is not a simple nostalgic return but a complex perception where past and present intersect and even fracture. Ultimately, this new sensory experience, unlocked by the photograph’s intervention in characters’ inner and outer lives, is key to Eileen Chang’s response to modernity and the formation of her distinctive sensory modernity.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 黃璿璋 政治大學中國文學博士，現任中正大學中國文學系助理教授。研究領域為近現代文學與文化、視覺文化，獲臺灣中文學會四賢博士論文獎第一名與政大博士學位論文獎，研究論文發表於《漢學研究》、《臺大中文學報》、《中外文學》等期刊，著有《後經典時代：現代視閾中的「四大奇書」及其改寫》。
Prof. HUANG Hsuan-chang Ph.D. in Chinese Literature (NCCU); currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Literature (CCU). His research focuses on modern and contemporary literature and culture, as well as visual culture. He received the First Prize of the Four Sages Dissertation Award from the Taiwan Association of Chinese Literature and the Dissertation Award from NCCU. His research articles have been published in journals such as Chinese Studies, Journal of Chinese Literature of NTU, and Chung Wai Literary. He is the author of The Post-Canon Age: Rewritings of The Four Master Works in Modern Perspectives.
This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series | 張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty & Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
