Mapping Hong Kong

Abstract

In this presentation, I explore the specific ways in which maps perform a diagrammatic reclamation of space, a process that has served as a privileged site for questions of cultural legitimacy and identity in Hong Kong since 1997. I compare works that celebrate the uncertainty of territorial claims—including Ai Wei Wei’s recent map installation, ‘Baby Formula 2013’, and the protest maps that dotted the various occupation sites of the Umbrella Movement—to formations that attempt to crystallize space and eliminate narrative possibilities. These latter forms of spatial reclamation include the map of HSBC’s history chiseled into its quasi-public plaza and the replicas of nineteenthcentury 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. Governed by the politics of capturing space and the open- ended poetics of lingering, these diverse practices map onto public space the imagined pasts and possible futures they posit for the post-unification geobody.