Placing ‘Asia’ against the ‘West’: Occidentalism and the Production of Architectural Images in Shanghai and Hong Kong

Abstract

The paper explores the idea of architecture and Occidentalism in the writings of building journals and illustrated magazines in the early 20th century. More specifically, it examines how images of architecture, buildings and landscapes of the “West” and the “non-West” had been used as key tropes to construct particular imaginaries and moral claims at a specific time and space: Republican Shanghai and colonial Hong Kong from the mid 1920s to late 1930s. Central to these developments was the emergence of new image-making practices that were made available by modern printing technologies, which led to a surge of production and circulation of images in the popular press. As a salient representation of modernity, progress and achievements of “civilizations,” images of architecture came to capture attention of architects and builders, cultural producers the fast-growing middle class reading public in these metropolises. The exploration of these representational practices raises several questions: What kinds of knowledge have been produced through these narratives of “Western” and “non-Western” built forms? What kinds of knowledge did the authors of these writings hope to produce, and what kinds of knowledge might the readers of these publications have produced through the consumption of them? Finally, if these narrative productions can be seen as processes of Occidentalism, what new insights on can they offer to architectural scholars through revisiting these materials in the 21st century?