Appropriating Disappearance: The Emergent Agora of Hong Kong
Atmosphere and Agency
Supervisor - Mr Tsuto Sakamoto
Equal parts allegory and cruel reality, the Emergent Agora of Hong Kong — finding form in a subterfugous Museum of Hong Kong is situated within Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, and directly abutting the politically-contentious West Kowloon Terminus — an infrastructural appendage to the Chinese Mainland. This thesis emerges from the ideological and semantic affinities between the agora and emporia as an architectural agent to negotiate the complex geopolitical relationship between autonomous Hong Kong and China, prognosticating a future between 2027 and 2047 — when guaranteed autonomous rule ends. It is an architectural elucidation and perpetuation of Hong Kong-ness, a condition of practice rather than codification perpetually at risk of, and opportunistically befitting from what Ackbar Abbas deems as “imminent disappearance”. Drawing from a spectrum of literature and visual cultural sources, this is an architecture that interrogate the interlinkages between street confrontations, subversive resistance, cultural production and capitalistic consumption, all framed within the inevitable contemporary condition of cinematization and mediafication of memories and events through contemporary surveillance and image-making, to highly-ambivalent results.
A highly ceremonious route stratifies commercial, and more critically political actors. The Confrontational Arena makes manifest the possibility for the extremes to occur — here, the chaos of mass protests confronts image-making and manipulation, where moveable commercial displays either amplify and aid subversion or hinder its propagation.
The opportunistic emporia — Hong Kong's distinctiveness made manifest through the right and desire to make one's views known. Every chance to express is capitalised upon, from construction to cultural events to commercial activities.
An architecture emerging from the geometrically-strict masterplan of the West Kowloon Cultural District, an insidious power-play takes place. Utopia — a propagandistic space of Cultural Chineseness, intersects with Protopia — a space where the practice of everyday life and its messiness pans out.
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Portfolio - http://www.seanpoon.info/
Tags:#authoritarianism #censorship #China #culture #disappearance #hongkong #identity #museum #politics #protopia #street #utopia #westkowloon #2047
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