Day: November 11, 2026

1. EVENT INFO

University of Hong Kong
Title: What Bamboo Means to Hong Kong and Macau
Date: Monday, 30 November 2026
Time: 18:30-20:30
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Speakers: Christopher Dewolf, Dennis Cheung, Rafaella Endrizzi, Rita Machado & João Ó (Impromptu Projects)

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Comparative Literature, HKU

Booking link: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?guest=Y&ueid=110327

2. EVENT INTRO

Would Hong Kong be the same place without bamboo? Join Professor Daniel Elam, co-director of Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, as he talks with Zolima Culture Guide editor and writer Christopher Dewolf, scholar and photographer Raffaella Endrizzi, industrial designer Dennis Cheung and founders of multi-disciplinary studio Impromptu Projects Rita Machado & João Ó about the role bamboo has played in Hong Kong’s culture and cityscape.

3. BOOK DESCRIPTION

Zolima Culture Guide. Vol.3

The Bamboo Metropolis – The City Made By Bamboo

WHY WE CREATED THE BAMBOO METROPOLIS

Hong Kong has a habit of overlooking what has always been there.

Bamboo is everywhere. It climbs skyscrapers, shelters opera singers, steams dim sum, becomes lion heads and lanterns, frames rituals and inspires artists and architects.

It is one of Hong Kong’s defining materials — and one of its least understood.

Today, bamboo scaffolding is facing increasing pressure. Traditional crafts are losing apprentices. Knowledge that has shaped Hong Kong for generations is becoming more fragile. Yet this isn’t a story about disappearance or nostalgia.

It is a book about scaffolders and chefs, theatres and skyscrapers, artists and artisans, rituals and reinvention. Above all, it is a book about the material that has helped Hong Kong become itself.

At the very moment many people assume bamboo belongs to the past, it is being rediscovered in unexpected ways. Architects are testing it as a sustainable building material. Artists are using it to explore memory, identity and place. Designers are uncovering new possibilities in one of Hong Kong’s oldest materials. Younger Hongkongers are beginning to see what has always been in front of them.

That is why we created The Bamboo Metropolis: to look closely at bamboo before it is reduced to nostalgia — and to ask how it can continue to grow.

The Bamboo Metropolis is not a lament. It’s an argument for attention. It explains how bamboo works, why it matters and what could be lost if Hong Kong allows this knowledge to fade.

The Bamboo Metropolis  spans more than 330 pages, richly illustrated with original photography and specially commissioned illustrations. Combining long-form storytelling with visual essays, the book offers a fresh perspective on a material that most of us see every day — but rarely stop to understand.

4. SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES

Christopher DeWolf
Christopher DeWolf has been writing about Hong Kong for more than 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, as well as the editor and co-author of the Zolima Culture Guide series of books. 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.

Dennis Cheung
Dennis is a Hong Kong registered architect and founding partner of Studio RYTE, focusing on sustainability and material innovation. His multidisciplinary work has earned the Architizer A+, AIA Sustainability, Dezeen and SaloneSatellite awards, with pieces in the permanent collections of M+ and SaloneSatellite Permanent Collection. Two recent projects, Benboo and Scaffold, reflect on the future of bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong. Cheung is currently senior lecturer and deputy programme director of the Design+ programme at the University of Hong Kong.

Rafaella Endrizzi
Raffaella Endrizzi is an architect, photographer, educator and writer based in Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from ETH Zurich and studied photography with Hélène Binet. She is co-author of Lochergut – Ein Portrait (Quart, 2019), a social and urbanistic study of Zurich’s Lochergut housing block that won the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award. Her research explores the knowledge and stories held in making and in buildings: Scaffold and Memory documents Hong Kong’s bamboo-scaffolding makers, and Blöck – Geschichten aus der Rigistrasse traces a prefabricated housing ensemble from the 1960s in Switzerland and their inhabitants’ stories before demolition. She has taught at HKU, CUHK and ETH Zurich.


Rita Machado & João Ó (Impromptu Projects)
João Ó and Rita Machado are founders of the Macau-based multidisciplinary studio Impromptu Projects. The practice operates across architecture, ephemeral structures, interior design, public space interventions, curatorial services, and community-oriented projects, while critically examining their social and cultural relevance within contemporary urban contexts. The duo’s work has been exhibited internationally, notably representing Macau at the 53rd Venice Biennale of Art (2009) and the 14th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014). Their practice has received several international distinctions, including the German Design Award (2025), Macau Architecture Award (2024), Muse Design Awards (2024), Architizer A+Awards (2024) and many more.

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

Follow us on:
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/csgc.hku
– Instagram: @csgc.hku

Date: Tuesday, 1 December
Time: 4:00 PM Hong Kong Time
Venue: CRT 4.30, The University of Hong Kong

All are welcome. No registration necessary.
Inquiries: roellimr@hku.hk

Speaker 1: Takashi Fujitani

Talk Title

“From Regional Empire to Modern Imperialism: Rethinking early modern Japan as an empire”

Talk Abstract

By now scholars have thoroughly discredited the idea that Japan during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) was a closed country (sakoku) isolated from the world, but few have dared to reconceptualize Japan in this period as its apparent opposite: an empire that was in many ways comparable to early modern European empires. The presentation argues that while Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in the late-sixteenth century failed, his dream of empire was realized in the relationship of the Tokugawa regime to the han domains, to the Ryūkyū Kingdom, and to Ezo (Hokkaido). The point is not to draw a straight line of continuity between the early modern and modern Japanese empires, but rather to understand the distinctive characteristics of the two imperial formations and their effects upon especially the Ryūkyū Kingdom (Okinawa) and the indigenous peoples of Ezo (Hokkaido).

Speaker Bio

Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Chair in Asia Pacific Studies, Emeritus at the University of Toronto. His major works include: Splendid Monarchy (UC Press, 1996); Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During WWII (UC Press, 2011); and Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (co-edited, Duke U. Press, 2001). He is editor of the book series Asia Pacific Modern (UC Press) and has held numerous grants and fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently working on several books: The Japanese Empire (under contract with Polity Press); Promise of Freedom: Nation, Empire, and Sovereign in Japan’s Modernity; and Cold War Clint: Asians, “Indians” and Others in an American Political (Un)conscious.

Speaker 2: Lisa Yoneyama

Talk Title

“On Nuclear Necropolitics”

Talk Abstract

My workshop presentation will address the relationship between nuclear criticism and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. In recent years, scholars concerned with nuclear issues have increasingly turned to Mbembe’s work to theorize premature death and disposability at various nuclearized sites and through various nuclear activities—from mining, refining, waste disposal to the testing and actual use of nuclear weapons, as well as accidents at nuclear power plants. What can we gain by examining today’s deeply nuclearized world through Mbembe’s conceptualization of necropolitics? What dimensions of Mbembe’s argument acquire particular urgency when considered in relation to the disproportionate burdens of violence distributed across unevenly nuclearized sites and populations? By exploring recent works of nuclear criticism, this presentation illuminates the tension between the demand for analytics attentive to geohistorical distinctions among specific nuclear “death-worlds” and the drive to subsume Mbembe’s “repressed topographies of cruelty” under the universal human.

Speaker Bio

Lisa Yoneyama is Professor of East Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and taught cultural studies in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she also served as director of the Critical Gender Studies program. Yoneyama’s research examines the politics of memory, violence and justice, with a particular focus on transpacific knowledge production. Her publications include Hiroshima Traces (UC Press, 1999), Perilous Memories (co-edited, Duke University Press, 2001), Violence, War, Redress (in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2003), and Cold War Ruins (Duke University Press, 2016), which received the 2018 Best Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Yoneyama’s current book project, Co-Conjuring Decolonial Nuclear Criticisms, has been supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant.

For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/

Follow us on:
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/csgc.hku
– Instagram: @csgc.hku