Special Talk: Contemporary Asia at the Millennium’s End: Debordering Hong Kong Cinema and Commonality/Difference in Urban Spaces

We are pleased to welcome C. J. W.-L. Wee, Professor at the Nanyang Technological University, for a special lecture.
Anyone interested is welcome to attend.

Date: Friday, July 5, 2024, 18:00-19:30
Venue: GA Lecture Room (4F), TAKI PLAZA, Ueno Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts

Presenter: C. J. W.-L. Wee ((Professor, Nanyang Technological University)
Moderator: Yoshitaka Mori (Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts)

Organizer: Yoshitaka Mori Lab, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts
Language: English

My forthcoming book, A Regional Contemporary, examines the complex possibilities in imagining a contemporary Asia. It investigates an increase in cultural expression—biennial-style art exhibitions, new discourses in modern and contemporary art, debordered popular culture—from about 1979–2008 that, in relation to expanded and regionally interconnected capitalist energies, performatively projected a fictive and feverish but shared contemporary regional identity onto disjunctive spatial standpoints in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Capitalist modernisation and urbanisation are central for the Asian imaginary.

We may ask, “How was an East Asian urban-modern represented in the region’s popular culture?” I concentrate on two indicative Hong Kong cinematic experiments at millennium’s end, when its core regional ethnic-Chinese audience was in decline. I focus on multilingual film that might appeal to a middle class that was increasingly constituted through extra-national networks of markets and cultural flows. The region’s built environment was vital to these experiments. The two films are: Lee Chi-Ngai’s Sleepless Town (Fuyajo/Bu ye cheng, 1998), a noirish depiction of shifting identities and loyalties in Kabukichō, centring on a half-Chinese gangster; and Jingle Ma’s Tokyo Raiders (Dongjing gonglue, 2000), a film consonant with the region’s libidinization of market modernity. The films map the region as containing urban spaces that are simultaneously not-quite-national and not-quite-transnational.

C. J. W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has held Visiting Fellowships at (among other institutions) the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India, and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University. Wee is the author of The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007) and he has recently completed A Regional Contemporary: Art Exhibitions, Popular Culture, Asia (MIT Press, forthcoming).