Pan Lu

The devastating tropical climate created strong fear and anxiety in the British troops who stationed at Hong Kong after the opium wars. The 19th Century myth of Miasma, the bad air, related epidemic diseases with air, environment and race, which later helped to consolidate the vertical segregation on Hong Kong island. Acclimatization efforts were made in pace with expansion of the British Botanic Empire, a global network of scentific researches of plants, which circulated not only botanic specimens but also images created for the purpose of study. In the particular case of Canton in South China, local commercial artists were commissioned to make plant paintings. This work examines the peculiar dynamics between imperialism, scientific research, race and the right to look in 19th Century Canton.

Drawing on films made by Chinese state studios in the 1950s–1980s, this work revisits island narratives of war, revolution, espionage, and class struggle once shaped to engineer shared sentiments. Images from these features are dismantled and recomposed as propaganda dissolves into tropical murmurs, blurring borders between history and fantasy, individual and collective.

The film presents urban space in Hong Kong as a vivid showcase of the hidden logics of globalization, capitalism and historical changes of today’s world cities. The film contains three chapters that is parallel to but interwoven with each other: global, local and border space. The film examines a series of urban landscapes in Hong Kong to illustrate the tension among their visual existence, function and ownership, and how the city’s public space has been constructed, used, owned and interpreted.

The film begins and ends in a shopping centre in Hong Kong. We carefully observe the smooth movement of the escalators, the constant flow of people that never stops, the musical fountain that presides over the centre of the internal courtyard, as if this gigantic complex could concentrate the circulation of the entire city, or even, the entire country. From there, it will be more a tale about concrete, enormous port warehouses, glazed galleries built for the 2010 universal exhibition, overpopulated tower blocks, the fragments of still recent colonialism...

With the form of remote audio conversation for its main narrative, the essay film consists of four chapters, each of which has its own focus but is also interconnected with each other. Blending voice narratives in four languages, moving images and literary texts, the film is mainly made from home video collections created in the 1990s from both filmmakers’ families, with home videos shot in the 1960s by a Hong Kong family as interludes. The film not only unfolds how East Asian families created their own image with amateur filming devices but also tells stories of migration, travelling, growing and familial relationships.​