Abstract
The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), as an exemplar of “heterotopias of deviation”. Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault’s heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into “Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts”. Tai Kwun (“Big Station” in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun’s spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault’s original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present.
Highlights
The transformation of what is commonly referred to as the Central Police Station compound (CPS) into “Tai Kwun: Center for Heritage and the Arts” marks an important shift in the complexity of neo-Victorian heterotopian spaces in Hong Kong
Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site
Tai Kwun is an exemplar of how creative adaptive reuse1 can, for example, speak to the present’s appropriation of the nineteenth century past for its own aesthetic and political needs
Summary
The transformation of what is commonly referred to as the Central Police Station compound (CPS) into “Tai Kwun: Center for Heritage and the Arts” marks an important shift in the complexity of neo-Victorian heterotopian spaces in Hong Kong. The adaptive reuse of the CPS compound, which consists of three Victorian buildings (the Central Police Station, Central Magistracy, and Victoria Prison) into a prison museum and contemporary art gallery surrounded by privatized public space means that the present ordering of aesthetic objects, spaces and experiences are (re-)enforced by the former carceral system. Many CPS buildings and the prison were partially demolished after the Japanese occupation and bombing of Hong Kong, which reflects the tendency of neo-Victorian texts and archi-texts in Asia to house the double memory of European and Japanese colonialism Kong that was simultaneously symbolic to and estranged from daily life
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