THE ‘Old Hong Kong’ and ‘A Gold-Sifting Bird’: Hong Kong and Chinese Ekphrasis in Contemporary British Poetry

Abstract

This article aims to establish two emerging literary traditions observed in contemporary British poetry. Starting with Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade (2015), there have been a group of debut collections by British poets with Hong Kong heritage. Some of them were born in the UK, while others emigrated there for personal, familial, or professional reasons. Examining their ekphrastic practices, namely, their poetic engagements with the visual arts, I will recognise two entangled, geographically specific kinds of ekphrasis, namely, Hong Kong ekphrasis and Chinese ekphrasis. I have observed that the former as seen in recent British poetry is used to reconstruct an ‘old Hong Kong', which is characterised by an expatriate or second-generation point of view and conflicts with the city faced by the social movements since 2014. The latter self-reflexively engages with traditional Chinese art and the most sensitive topics in China’s history. Together, the two overlapping but individually distinct types of ekphrasis enrich and complicate our understanding of the long ekphrastic tradition, the young tradition of Hong Kong poetry, the close connections between contemporary British poetry, cultural memory, and diaspora, and the complex geopolitical relations between Hong Kong, mainland China, and the UK.