Abstract

Traces of an Invisible City (2016) presents urban space in Hong Kong as a vivid showcase of the hidden logics of globalization and capitalism, and of the historical changes currently occurring in world cities. It examines a series of urban landscapes in Hong Kong to illustrate the tension among their visual existence, function, and ownership, and how the city’s public space has been constructed, used, owned, and interpreted. Public spaces, which are primary loci where public life happen, are regarded here as nodal points that connect the city’s past, present and future. The film contains three chapters that are parallel to but interwoven with each other: global, local, and divided space. “The exhibition” observes Art Basel, one of the largest art fairs in the world, held at Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center in an inside-out manner — through the architecture’s space and function, the visitors and the post-usage conditions of the space to reveal its symbolic and literal void. “The Streets” explores the dramatic transformations of Hong Kong’s public space in recent years, blended with flashbacks of history. “The North Side” juxtaposes the Hong Kong-Shenzhen division area in their visual reversal, where Hong Kong’s agricultural landscape became a spectacle from the rapidly urbanized side of the socialist China.

Link to publication in Landscape Architecture Frontiers