Designer Nostalgia in Hong Kong

Abstract

As a means of framing and filtering the past, nostalgia asserts a sense of stability in a context of imminent change. The nostalgic reconstruction of history at once seems to extinguish history’s temporal distance, while providing for a pleasant experience through the repression of its negative aspects. In the late twentieth century, nostalgia became a common experience as history and tradition began to play a crucial role in consumer culture. The uncertainty faced by Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, with the anxiety of the 1997 handover looming, made it an exemplary production site for a wide range of nostalgic cultural products. Through the analysis of two prominent exponents of Hong Kong nostalgic design—graphic designer Alan Chan and fashion house Shanghai Tang—this article examines nostalgia’s appeal to both local and global audiences. Alan Chan’s graphic design work in the 1980s, and his subsequent move into product design in the 1990s, were marked by the appropriation of nineteenth-century China Trade paintings and Shanghai commercial imagery from the 1920s and 1930s. The fashion house Shanghai Tang provides a further example of Hong Kong’s nostalgia fever, but with a more eclectic approach to Chinese history taking in not only modern Shanghai, but Qing dynasty and Maoist nostalgia as well. On the one hand, both companies are products of a specific local context that reflects Hong Kong identity. On the other, both appeal to a particular global imaginary in order to sell nostalgic Chinese fantasies to a global market. A combination of the Greek words nostos (to return home) and algia (a painful condition), the term “nostalgia” was coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the late seventeenth century to describe extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenaries fighting in distant lands.1 It described a medical condition, the symptoms of which included despondency, melancholia, mood swings, weeping, anorexia, and suicide attempts. Nostalgia remained a medical or psychological disease until the twentieth century, during which the term lost its medical usage and its core referent, “homesickness,” but retained some sense of “home-like” sentiments as it was assimilated into Western popular culture after World War II. In popular culture, nostalgia’s appeals to continuity of identity proved popular in the face of the various forms of discontinuity inherent in modernization’s program of rapid change. For Fred Davis: The nagging sense of the absence of a future undercuts what is perhaps the chief unspoken aim of nostalgia’s 1 F. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: The Free Press, 1979). The original article is Johannes Hofer, “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia,” published in 1688 in Latin (English translation by Carolyn K. Anspach, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2 (1934): 376–391). In a design context, see also Jonathan M. Woodham, Twentieth Century Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Chapter 9 of this text, “Nostalgia, Heritage and Design” examines late-twentieth-century nostalgic design in Britain and the U.S. © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology