Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
Volume 8, Issue 1, Spring 2021
Bordering Hong Kong: Aesthetics and Politics
Guest editors: Pan Lu and Jon Solomon
The increasing importance of the problematic of bordering in the questions posed to the social production of knowledge has given rise to what some scholars believe may be called a bordering turn. To be distinguished from the old question of the border and its associated problems of classification and identity, the new bordering turn is focused on the processes of drawing a border and the practices that constitute the 鈥渢hings鈥� between which the social institution of the border appears to be naturalized or given. Although the essentially political aspect of the act of bordering cannot be denied, it is above all an aesthetic phenomenon. The term aesthetic serves here as a marker of a disjunction between, variously: sensation and signification, the sensuous and the discursive, poetics and politics, fiction and the real.
This special issue of聽The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art聽aims to explore the aesthetics of the bordering turn specifically in relation to Hong Kong, a city that has long been on various literal, imagined and symbolic borders. We鈥檙e looking for new ways of thinking, representing, depicting, and intervening that abandon the tired old motifs of Hong Kong as, variously, an outpost, a frontline, a bridge, a filter, a transition point, a training ground, etc., in favor of attempts to expose aesthetic acts of bordering in a 鈥渓ong contemporary鈥� time frame, namely, from the postwar period to the present. Examples of these acts include: visual art, cinema, performing arts, sound art, popular culture, print and digital media, publishing culture, curatorial practices, architecture, fashion, literature, translation, migration, protest, counter protest, high frequency trading, algorithmic governance, automation and AI, etc.
The Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, published by Intellect, seeks to explore the relationship between contemporary art and Chinese cultural identity in its broadest sense. This peer-reviewed journal provides a forum for critical debate into visual art produced as part of the liberalization of culture that has taken place within mainland China since 1978. It also explores works produced by artists of non-Chinese ethnicity who live and work within Chinese contexts or whose work has a strong relationship to Chinese culture, society and history. This scholarly publication is an associate journal of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts, Birmingham City University.
Possible topics can be (but are not limited to):
– The making of borders in Hong Kong art
– Migrant literature in Hong Kong
– Bordering practice in Hong Kong cinema
– Translation as a bordering practice/Foreign representations and translations of Hong Kong
– Bordering in sound art in Hong Kong
– Visualizing protest and border-making in Hong Kong
– Hong Kong urban space and borders
– Hong Kong diaspora and Its expressions
– Representations of settler colonialism and refugee experience in Hong Kong
– The aesthetic 鈥渓ines鈥� of gender politics in Hong Kong
– Theoretical discussions of the relation between acts of mediation/bordering and acts of identification
– Romanticism and aesthetic ideology in Hong Kong
– The aesthetics of financialization and algorithmic governance
Publication Timeline:
1 June 2020, abstracts due (300 words)
30 November 2020, full manuscripts due (7鈥�8,000 words)
Publication: Spring 2021
Please send submissions and correspondence to:
Guest editors Pan Lu (lu.pan@polyu.edu.hk) and Jon Solomon (jon.solomon@univ-lyon3.fr) with the subject 鈥楯CCA 8.1鈥�. Please visit Intellect鈥檚 website www.intellectbooks.com to follow its house referencing guidelines.
糖心视频 Guest Editors:
Pan Lu is Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Culture, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR
Jon Solomon is Professor, Department of Chinese, Universit茅 Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Lyon, France