Using Evans Chan’s documentary Raise the Umbrellas (2016) as a springboard, this essay examines the role gender identity and sexual orientation plays in Hong Kong’s rich history of protest culture.

Responding to Open Philosophy’s call ‘Does public art have to be bad art?’, in this paper we argue that this discussion should pay attention to the consequences of structural transformations that guide the production and presentation of public art in today’s increasingly private city. While entrepreneurial governance and corporate branding strategies generate new opportunities, they might also result in increased risk averseness and control over the content of public art, thus putting its critical potential at risk. That observation ushers in urgent questions about control, complicity and criticality. We aim to reflect on those questions through two public art projects in Hong Kong: Antony Gormley’s Event Horizon (2015) and Our 60-second friendship begins now (2016) by Sampson Wong Yu-hin and Jason Lam Chi-fai. After drawing conclusions on the justification of public funding for co-productions, the legitimacy for artists to sometimes not ‘follow the rules’, and the problematic nature of a narrow definition of professionalism as a means to discredit artists, our analysis underlines the urgent need to develop a framework that can guide discussions on the consequences of control and complicity for the critical potential of public art.

Studies on Hong Kong’s history have viewed the 1967 riots as a watershed in the formation of Hong Kong identity in the 1960s and 1970s. However, by considering MacLehose’s social policies as the main contribution to Hong Kong identity formation and defining China as ‘the Other’ in that process, the prevailing view overlooks the multifaceted nature of Hong Kong identity formation and the continuity of Hong Kong’s historical development between the mid-1960s and the 1970s. This article questions that view by investigating the Cultural Revolution discourse in three rarely examined yet representative Hong Kong youth and student journals: Undergrad (Xueyuan), Chinese University Student Press (Zhongda xuesheng bao), and Pan Ku (Pangu). Through examining the three publications’ interpretations of the Cultural Revolution during nationalist moments and movements in Hong Kong—the 1967 riots, the Chinese Language movement, the Defending the Diaoyu Islands movement, and the ‘Learning about China, Caring about Society’ campaign—the article discusses the ways in which the Cultural Revolution profoundly affected educated youth and students by contributing to the mutual development of their national and local identities at the intersection of political, ideological, cultural, and geographical perspectives. By documenting the local practices of the Cultural Revolution and the concept of ‘serving the people,’ the article demonstrates that Chinese nationalism, along with Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, played an important role in the formation of Hong Kong identity in the colonial setting.

This paper maps the spectral temporalities of Hong Kong in the wakes of the official opening of the high-speed rail link in West Kowloon. Probing the spectral figurations of time in the city through Jacques Derrida’s spectrality discourse, the paper connects spectrality with the method of “deep mapping” as proposed by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in Theatre/Archaeology
(2005). This method aligns the poetic with the discursive, the fictional and the historical in order to set up an alternative archive of a locale with narratives that traverse and overlay the past, the present, and the future. I consider the notion of time through the act of “counting down” to 1997 and to 2047, and center this deep map on the site of West Kowloon. The reflection is placed in the context of the high-speed rail link, Wong Kar-wai’s train to 2046, a censored, or “disappeared” artwork originally presented on the International Commerce Centre (ICC) by Sampson Wong Yu-hin and Jason Lam Chi-fai “Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now / Countdown Machine” (2016), and the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Although the idea of freedom has been well studied as an ideal in political philosophy, relatively little scholarship has focused on the human experience of freedom. Drawing on ethnographic research between 2012 and 2013, I examine how freedom was achieved by people who practice freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. I show that the freedom that these people pursue, either individually or collectively, is not a freedom without constraints but a freedom that must be attained through the exercise of deliberation, restraint, and self-discipline. While freegans seek liberation by withdrawing from the world and practicing self-cultivation (chushi asceticism), freecyclers do so by engaging with worldly affairs in order to create social changes (rushi asceticism). In both cases, by reimagining freedom as ethical practices rather than a right that comes naturally with birth, freegans and freecyclers in Hong Kong are able to experience moments of freedom despite inevitable structural constraints.

This article explores recent changes in Hong Kong’s independent documentary filmmaking during a decade of escalating protests in the territory, focusing in particular on cinema’s role in Hong Kong’s “movement field.” It focuses on Ying E Chi, an important distributor and promoter of Hong Kong independent films, the annual Hong Kong Independent Film Festival it organizes, and three recent documentaries it distributes that are relevant to the 2019–2020 protests. Drawing on participant observation at film screenings, interviews with filmmakers and textual analysis, the author argues that independent documentaries function in Hong Kong’s “movement field” in three main ways: by contributing to and providing a space for civic discourse, by facilitating international advocacy and by engaging in memory work. Its contributions to civic culture, it asserts, are reflected in the films’ observational aesthetic, which invites reflection and discussion. Public screenings and lengthy post-screening discussions are important ways in which these functions are realized.