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

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