Monuments and the face of time: distortions of scale and asynchrony in postcolonial Hong Kong

Abstract

This essay examines the theme of monuments and monumentality in Hong Kong by focusing on the proliferation of images of the Star Ferry terminal and clocktower prior to its demolition and the circulation of these images via on-line image-sharing sites. I am especially interested in the act of photography under these circumstances and what it might mean for a consideration of participatory democracy in a postcolonial context. More generally there is the question of what role the image plays in constituting historical memory in an embodied sense – especially in a city that is characterized in many ways as image. My essay examines the extent to which historical memory of colonial experiences is still in part materially constitutive of Hong Kong's postcolonial consciousness – and this is registered in community activism around the preservation of sites marked for demolition. What this activism produces is what I will call a spectral monumentality, a bringing into existence of invisible monuments – in this case, the memories of demolished structures which survive in an embodied form, supported by miniature images in the digital photographs uploaded and shared on internet sites, and small, publicly available documentary movies posted on YouTube. To think in greater detail about the meaning of the ‘spectral monument’, I draw upon Wu Hung's discussion of ‘political space’, not simply as a conceptual sphere of public discourse or a physical space where public events occur, but rather as the architectonic embodiment of political ideology and a site for activating political action and expression.