Looking beyond ‘buildings of chrome and glass’: Hong Kong’s ‘uncanny postcoloniality’ in photographs of Tin Shui Wai

Abstract

Hong Kong has a unique postcolonial identity. After being colonised by Britain for over a century and a half, it was ceremoniously handed over to China in 1997, without necessitating any bloody wars or even skirmishes. Hong Kong has continued to enjoy a privileged status within China due to the doctrines enshrined in the ‘one country two systems’ policy. She has benefited from becoming part of a nation with the fastest growing economy in the world, and the people of Hong Kong have for the most part acquiesced to the reduction in levels of political freedom. However, recent events like the Umbrella Movement spearheaded mainly by student protesters has brought to the fore the cracks in Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity and the city finds itself once again precariously poised in a moment of transition.

Theorising a connection between Hong Kong’s postcolonial predicament and the city state’s physical landscape, I analyse Hong Kong photographer Derrick Chang’s photos of Tin Shui Wai, a remote new town located on Hong Kong’s northwestern edge. Tin Shui Wai is a failed new town – it was developed to house workers who would serve the industries that were projected to develop there in the 1990s. However, these labour-intensive industries never materialised due to the meteoric rise of Guangdong’s manufacturing industry. Instead Tin Shui Wai has now come to be known as the ‘city of sadness’, notorious for its gruesome murders, high rate of domestic abuse and tragic suicides. Through an analysis of Chang’s photographs of Tin Shui Wai depicting isolation, stagnation and urban detritus, this article argues that the uncanny, spectral spaces of encounter raise questions and provide an alternative and more disquieting narrative of Hong Kong’s postcolonial identity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] A note about the photographs used in this article. I came across Derrick Chang’s images of Hong Kong, especially his images of Tin Shui Wai on the internet. Given my pre-existing interest in TSW, I approached Chang and commissioned him to create a portfolio of Tin Shui Wai photographs. I did not discuss my ideas with him at all and gave him full freedom to produce the images he wanted to capture.

[2] See extensive coverage of these issues in the July and August 2016 issues of South China Morning Post.

Additional information

Funding

It is acknowledged that part of the research for this article has been funded by the Research Grants Council [grant number 18605515].

Notes on contributors

Bidisha Banerjee

Bidisha Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities at The Education University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include South Asian diasporic fiction and film, visual culture and urban studies, particularly the Hong Kong cityscape. Her work has appeared in journals like Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Her current book project attempts to study the narrated image in postcolonial literature which functions as a photographic metaphor to enhance the themes of the literary text.

Derrick Chang is the photographer of all the images, and the author of the article has sole permission to use these images for academic purposes. Chang can be contacted at: [email protected].