Traces of an Invisible City: Three Notes on Hong Kong

A cinematic and conceptually inventive film that explores the haunting memories of Asia’s late 20th-century modernization through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War. Yet, in every wig resides a ghost from the imperial past.

The film follows a young boy who sets out on a mission to try and track down his long lost parents.

A visual exploration of the abandoned site of the former Armed Forces’ Hospital in Gwangju, South Korea, through rubbles, dusts, wild grasses, debris, ruins and human bodies. Haunted by memories of the failed democratic uprising in May 1980, the hospital opened in 2018 as a special site for the 12th Gwangju Biennale.

The film begins and ends in a shopping centre in Hong Kong. We carefully observe the smooth movement of the escalators, the constant flow of people that never stops, the musical fountain that presides over the centre of the internal courtyard, as if this gigantic complex could concentrate the circulation of the entire city, or even, the entire country. From there, it will be more a tale about concrete, enormous port warehouses, glazed galleries built for the 2010 universal exhibition, overpopulated tower blocks, the fragments of still recent colonialism...

An observational essay shot in the southwestern city of Chongqing, CHINA CONCERTO probes the uses of public spectacle in contemporary China. Born and raised in Chongqing, filmmaker Bo Wang visited his hometown at the height of now-disgraced politician Bo Xilai's campaign to revive Mao-era "red culture", promoting among other things the public singing and dancing of Communist songs. Alongside these participatory street performances, CHINA CONCERTO looks at images from the media, including Michelangelo Antonioni's Chung Kuo-China, and news media and advertising that address the capitalist present in forms reminiscent of the communist past. The situation is explored in a narration modeled on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, which is delivered by a woman with an ambiguous accent. Perched between an insider and outsider perspective, CHINA CONCERTO considers the persistence of totalitarian ideologies and images.

Drawing on films made by Chinese state studios in the 1950s–1980s, this work revisits island narratives of war, revolution, espionage, and class struggle once shaped to engineer shared sentiments. Images from these features are dismantled and recomposed as propaganda dissolves into tropical murmurs, blurring borders between history and fantasy, individual and collective.

Hong Kong is a key site of interest, Wang explores how the city operates as a liminal space situated between the legacy of British colonialism and its contemporary connection with mainland China. Through his carefully observed studies in architectural design, and the organisation of urban space, he reveals latent systems of power. He uses a range of archival and contemporary found footage, setting visual systems against each other to pose questions surrounding the production and consumption of images.

The devastating tropical climate created strong fear and anxiety in the British troops who stationed at Hong Kong after the opium wars. The 19th Century myth of Miasma, the bad air, related epidemic diseases with air, environment and race, which later helped to consolidate the vertical segregation on Hong Kong island. Acclimatization efforts were made in pace with expansion of the British Botanic Empire, a global network of scentific researches of plants, which circulated not only botanic specimens but also images created for the purpose of study. In the particular case of Canton in South China, local commercial artists were commissioned to make plant paintings. This work examines the peculiar dynamics between imperialism, scientific research, race and the right to look in 19th Century Canton.

Wang Xiao Xia lived a difficult life. Growing up in the orphanage with her brother taught her resilience. So when her irresponsible brother left her with his child, she took up the responsibility and raised the kid herself. Although it was hard to live life working between numerous jobs to make ends meet, she had always maintained an optimism and positive attitude in life.