published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-78).

Thesis (M.A.)--Zhongguo wen hua xue yuan. / Reproduced from typescript. Indludes bibliographical references (p. 159-160).

Thesis (M.A.)--Zhongguo wen hua xue yuan. / Reproduced from typescript. Indludes bibliographical references (p. 159-160).

published_or_final_version / abstract / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation examines representations of the city and media art in Hong Kong from the late 1980s to the present to establish a link between the ways in which the city's place identity is re-imag(in)ed. Charting the course of media art in Hong Kong in relation to the parallel development of contemporary art in the region, it provides critical analyses of dominant urban metaphors that play a significant role, both locally and internationally, in the current representation of Hong Kong and its artistic practices. Specifically, the study explores how media artists have been dealing with four central urban metaphors that frequently arise in discussions of Hong Kong in relation to its place identity: City in Transition, Panoramic City, Compact City, and Mobile City. The hypothesis of this essay concerns the ways in which both the selected media artists and their works negotiate central urban metaphors in their search for Hong Kong's place identity. I designate each of these negotiations as a 'spatial portrait': a space of representation in which social experiences and relations are reconstructed and investigated. Through the critical analysis of these spatial portraits, I consider the development, shifts and imbrications of urban metaphors for Hong Kong and their contributions to, as well as their limitations for, understandings of artistic representations of urban space. Recognizing the local-global nexus from which these works emerge through considerations of the imaging of Hong Kong in the media and tourism industries, I propose an interpretation of the metaphor of the Mobile City as an updated version of the City of Transition. Ultimately, this dissertation offers an understanding of urban metaphors in Hong Kong media art in relation to the re-imag(in)ing of place identity situated between globalization discourse and the cultural politics of urban space, location and representation. It concludes that contemporary art's contribution to t

No description available.

This dissertation examines the material culture of the Sino-British furniture trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company began importing a large quantity of furniture made in Canton (Guangzhou), China. As the trade between Britain and China became standardized around 1720, this furniture became a part of the private trade carried out by merchants associated with Company. Unlike other objects of the China trade that fed into the vogue of chinoiserie, export furniture crafted with hardwoods from the Indian Ocean was produced in European designs of the time and thus was often indistinguishable from its Western counterparts. What cultural and economic values did export furniture represent in the early modern maritime trade and how did it reify the trans-regional movement of knowledge and taste between China and Britain? Going beyond the conventional perspective on export Chinese objects oriented toward European reception, I connect production with consumption in order to follow the trajectory of export furniture from its origins in the intra-Asian timber trade to its requisition and manufacture in Canton to its reception and use in both Britain and China, highlighting how this process linked the disparate spheres of commerce, knowledge production and distribution, and cultural practices. In the course of exploring these multiple dimensions of the object’s material life, this dissertation underscores export furniture’s bicultural and transcultural characteristics. Utilizing diverse sets of visual, material, and textual sources, each chapter of the dissertation investigates different aspects of the movement of furniture as an assemblage. Chapter 1 reconstructs the itinerary of export furniture as a commodity from the EIC timber trade between India and China to the ordering and shipping of the furniture for the British market. I show how the character of export furniture was shaped by the constraints of space and the economic, environmental, and epistemic contingencies of long distance travel and communication. Chapter 2 examines the influence of imported Asian rosewood – an important cabinet timber from which most hardwood Chinese export furniture was made – on early modern British arboreal knowledge. If the knowledge of rosewood in the seventeenth century was grounded in classical texts that defined it as a subshrub growing in the eastern Mediterranean region, in the eighteenth century the term came to refer to a hardwood species imported from tropical Asia. I argue that this change allowed rosewood to obtain a new status as a universal category in the botanical taxonomy, which collected, pruned, and ordered heterogeneous cultural and natural information associated with it into a neatly classified “cabinet” of universal knowledge. Chapter 3 returns to Canton to investigate Cantonese cabinetmakers and the production of export furniture. By reading the joinery of extant export furniture pieces, I show how Chinese artisans recreated foreign forms by mobilizing their embodied knowledge of craft rather than by imitating European joinery constructions. The details of this material translation not only reflect the flexibility and resilience of traditional Chinese craft but also illuminate the tacit knowledge and craft patterns of early modern Chinese artisans. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the domain of consumption in Britain and China, respectively. Chapter 4 explores how Chinese cabinets were experienced in early modern Britain. Comparing lacquered and hardwood display cabinets, I show that Chinese cabinets were not just exotic objects; they played an active role in the evolution of the cabinet as a type of furniture in the domestic material culture and created an affective space both within themselves and in their ambient space that invited the bodily experience and imagination of the user-beholder. The final chapter examines the movement and adaptation of European round tables in mid-Qing Chinese material culture. Introduced by European mariners to Canton, the round tables quickly found their niche in local everyday life and eventually spread beyond Guangdong. I show how they partook in the formation of a new social dining practice that conveyed a new political vision of equality. As a whole, my dissertation argues that export furniture was a Eurasian object that embodied cross-cultural knowledge of craft and nature, and engendered new ideas of utility and sociability.

劉鳳霞. / "2012年8月". / "2012 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-201). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Liu Fengxia.