(Im)possible Maps of Hong Kong

Abstract

The map – rather than film, photography, poetry, fiction – has emerged as the most appropriate genre to write the (im)possibilities of Hong Kong’s future. While unable and pragmatically unwilling, in some ways, to mobilize a national identity, crafting maps in Hong Kong serves multiple and related purposes: to trouble the boundaries of China that depict it as a homogenous entity and to address Hong Kong’s own hopes and anxieties, and spatial and economic disparities. This paper surveys current mapping practices deployed to explore contestations over cultural legitimacy and identity in post-reunification Hong Kong. I take my examples from the re-release of Dung Kai-Cheung’s Atlas: An Archeology of an Imaginary City in English in 2012; Cities Without Ground (2013), a sometimes imaginative re-mapping of Hong Kong’s spatial relationships via its network of elevated walkways; Ai Wei Wei’s recent map installation, “Baby Formula 2013”; and the protest maps that dotted the various occupation sites of the Umbrella Movement. Against these maps that celebrate the uncertainty of territorial claims, the new phenomenon in Hong Kong of inscribing permanent maps onto privatized public space -- HSBC’s map of the bank’s history chiseled into its plaza and the replicas of nineteenth-century nautical maps inset into the grounds of 1881:Heritage, one of the government’s commercial adaptive re-use projects designed to rehabilitate Hong Kong’s historical sites – can be read as an attempt to recapture space and eliminate narratives of possibility. Governed by the politics of claiming space and the poetics of lingering, these diverse mapping practices index the purposeful occupation of public space. Despite its incorporation into the geography of China, I argue, stakeholders in Hong Kong strategically use the power of maps to renegotiate the contours of the city’s geobody and shape alternative experiences of urban space. This paper ends a discussion of the art platform MAP Office’s recent installation, “HK Is Land” (2014, see below), a series of (im)possible maps of Hong Kong – consisting of eight new islands offshore of Hong Kong that cannot be mapped -- attempt a spatial analysis that is both not Hong Kong and another Hong Kong. The maps shift the boundaries between Hong Kong and China to mobile or unstable territories constructed out of metaphors, oyster shells, trash, data or ships, offering a diverse range of ecologies. No longer waxing nostalgic about 'love at last sight', the city seems more invested in emplotment and visibility – map or be mapped – than it ever was at its period of greatest transition. Hong Kong maps challenge the fantasy of a smooth topography and emphasize the edges and margins of Chineseness where control and contestation are prominent.