Journal articles on the topic 'Films – Hong Kong'
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1
Wang, Kai, and Nan Li. "ANALYSIS OF HONG KONG ZOMBIE MOVIES AUDIOVISUAL LANGUAGE IN THE 1980S." International Journal of Law, Government and Communication 7, no. 29 (September 1, 2022): 18–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.35631/ijlgc.729002.
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As a subcultural type of genre film, Hong Kong zombie films play an important role in Hong Kong films. Hong Kong zombie films through visual languages such as color, light, lens, and auditory language such as language, music, and audio create a horror atmosphere and infect the emotions of the audience. The use of audiovisual language also implies the ideological representation of the collision between China and the West in Hong Kong in the 1980s.
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Lu, Xin. "Expression of Hong Kong Directors in the Chinese Main-Melody Film: The Artistic Propaganda." Asian Journal of Social Science Studies 7, no. 7 (August 1, 2022): 61. http://dx.doi.org/10.20849/ajsss.v7i7.1246.
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By analysing the main-melody film works of Hong Kong directors and the understandings and attitudes of audiences in both mainland China and Hong Kong toward these films, it is hoped that this research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the particularity of Hong Kong people’s national identity. This would provide a significant opportunity to advance the understanding of Hong Kong’s status and value in contemporary China and the world. Furthermore, this study will offer some critical insights into the distribution of Hong Kong films in mainland China.
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Liu, Xinyu. "A Probe in the Language Features of Fruit Chan's Films from the Perspective of Audio-visual Characteristics: Taking the Trilogy on Hong Kong's Return to China as an Example." BCP Social Sciences & Humanities 15 (March 13, 2022): 138–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.54691/bcpssh.v15i.380.
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After the territory of Hong Kong formally returned in 1997 to its rightful owner of China, Fruit Chan (Chen Guo), a director, rose to fame with his trilogy on HK's return (namely Little Cheung, Made in Hong Kong, and The Longest Summer). Since then, he has successively made many films reflecting humans' real living status. Most of Hong Kong-made films in the past were standardized and industrialized, such as comedies and action films which are familiar to us, while there were few realistic films that could indeed depict and present the social changes to the public. Therefore, films like Fruit Chan's, which demonstrates tragic and profound ideas, are extremely rare and valuable in Hong Kong's film industry. Although Chan has not produced many works, all of them are endowed with realistic hue, aesthetic characteristics, and profound humanistic thoughts, which makes his films monuments of Hong Kong's realistic ones. It is easy to find sense of mission and sentimental feelings in his films, enabling us to better see how Hong Kong films move forward in the direction of visual transmission after Hong Kong’s return to China from multiplex angles of view.
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Lu, Xiao. "Hollywood Genre, Cultural Hybridity, and Musical Films in 1950s Hong Kong." Arts 12, no. 6 (November 8, 2023): 237. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts12060237.
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Following the trauma of the Second World War, Hong Kong, under British governance, enjoyed considerable economic and political freedom to establish a local entertainment industry. Musical films became a major genre of Hong Kong’s film releases in the 1950s. Local melodramas, Hollywood musicals, celebrities, and ideals of female beauty were all present in the growth of Hong Kong musical films, which culminated in a glorious display of cinematic art. This article aims to provide insight into the popularity of Chinese-speaking musical films by examining the social, economic, and political complexity of 1950s Hong Kong, including post-war migration and colonial censorship. An in-depth analysis of Li Han-Hsiang’s The Kingdom and the Beauty demonstrates how Hong Kong studios adapted the Hollywood musical to tell Chinese stories and how Hong Kong musical films incorporated Chinese literature and music to represent cultural memory, local identity, and modern aesthetics. This case study sheds light on the localization of a Hollywood genre and the hybridization of Chinese and Western entertainment forms to appeal to a Chinese audience, thereby broadening the definition of cultural hybridity and informing the practice of Hong Kong’s musical filmmaking.
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Yang, Xinrui. "Postmodern Representations and Reflections in Hong Kong Urban Cinema: A Study on the Works of Heiward Mak Hei-Yan." Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences 24 (December 31, 2023): 726–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.54097/bmzw1726.
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In the new millennium, a discontinuity of postmodern elements began to surface in Hong Kong commercial films. However, young director Heiward Mak Hei-yan integrated postmodern elements into her works, which are primarily urban films, inheriting and developing the postmodern tradition of Hong Kong cinema. She does this primarily by shaping marginal urban landscapes and crowds, capturing the less noticed aspects of Hong Kong city, and demonstrating the anti-grand narrative characteristic of postmodernism. By establishing a postmodern perspective on love, she breaks and "rebels" against traditional romance films, not just merely glorifying the myth of love, but emphasizing the questioning of the eternal view of modern love. Simultaneously, she illustrates the dilemmas of postmodern alienation to portray the contemporary postmodern mentality and cultural symptoms of Hong Kong people in this unique geographical location. Her urban films reflect her positive thinking about urban romance, life, and mental state in a postmodern context, providing the possibility of parallelism between commerciality and postmodernism, and offering insights for the development of Hong Kong cinema.
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Hongjin He, Hilary. ""Chinesenesses" Outside Mainland China: Macao and Taiwan through Post-1997 Hong Kong Cinema." Culture Unbound 4, no. 2 (June 1, 2012): 297–325. http://dx.doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.124297.
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By examining the filmic representation of Macao and Taiwan in Hong Kong films, mostly released after the 1997 sovereignty transfer, this paper will address the notion of Chineseness in its plural form as associated with different Chinese societies. The purpose is to bring attention to the cosmopolitan side of Chineseness in Hong Kong cinema rather than the mere influence from the Mainland (PRC). I will argue that it is this pluralised, composite Chineseness reflected in Hong Kong cinema that has reinforced its very “Hong Kong-ness” against the impact from the “orthodox” Chineseness of the Mainland. Through a combination of textual and contextual analyses of selected Hong Kong diaspora films respectively set in Macao and Taiwan, this paper aims to provide a general understanding of the imbrications of various Chinese societies within Greater China and, most importantly, the changing role and position of Hong Kong (cinema) within this conceptual China as “one country” before and after it became a special part of the PRC.
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Chan, Charlene Peishan. "“I Want to be More Hong Kong Than a Hongkonger”." Lifespans and Styles 6, no. 1 (May 24, 2020): 13–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ls.v6i1.2020.4398.
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The years leading up to the political handover of Hong Kong to Mainland China surfaced issues regarding national identification and intergroup relations. These issues manifested in Hong Kong films of the time in the form of film characters’ language ideologies. An analysis of six films reveals three themes: (1) the assumption of mutual intelligibility between Cantonese and Putonghua, (2) the importance of English towards one’s Hong Kong identity, and (3) the expectation that Mainland immigrants use Cantonese as their primary language of communication in Hong Kong. The recurrence of these findings indicates their prevalence amongst native Hongkongers, even in a post-handover context.
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Chen, Fangyu. "The post-2000 Hong Kong young filmmakers: Embrace, resistance and new chances." New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 17, no. 2 (September 1, 2020): 209–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ncin_00017_1.
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This article is a text-based analysis of 107 Hong Kong local productions produced from 2000 to August 2018. These films are made by the current young generation of filmmakers who joined the industry in the new millennium, when it gradually entered an era marked by the domination of Hong Kong–mainland co-productions. With the aim of expanding the scholarly discussion on the emerging ‘Hong Kong SAR New Wave Cinema’, it identifies four themes that recurrently appear in their films: (1) a tendency to feature people with physical or mental disabilities as their protagonists; (2) the possession of a sense of nostalgia for the glorious 1980s; (3) a manifestation of larger Hong Kong–mainland relations through characters; and (4) varying degrees of politicization. The young generation of filmmakers, whose works denote the social responsibility these young people bring to their filmmaking, shows their greater engagement with civic issues, less consideration of the mainland market and capital and a stronger desire to tell local Hong Kong stories, preserve local Hong Kong culture and emphasize the Hong Kong identity it represents. These traits, as the conclusion argues, are rooted deeply in economic, cultural and political realities.
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Dong, Zhaoyang. "Encoding and Decoding: Mapping Social Value Shifts and Social Contexts in Hong Kong Crime Films." Communications in Humanities Research 9, no. 1 (October 31, 2023): 44–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.54254/2753-7064/9/20231099.
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Since the 1980s, Hong Kong film has had a wide impact on the world. Amongst this, crime films take a salient position. It results from the strong artistic tension within the production of crime films itself, and on the other hand, it provides us with rich material for studying the changing socio-cultural context of Hong Kong. The creation and dissemination of art is both a process of coding for the creator and a process of coding for the social context, a process that involves both the personal expression of the creator and inevitably the shaping of cultural codes by ideology. Since A Better Tomorrow, Hong Kong crime films, as a category of films closely connected to social reality, have had a significant impact in responding to social issues. The main content of Hong Kong crime films also has a strong role in shaping social contexts and influencing audiences perceptions in a subtle way. Therefore, in the process of creation, apart from thinking about the artistry of the films, the impact on the shaping of social perceptions of the films also needs to be taken into consideration.
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Laukkanen, Tatu-Ilari. "Shanghai gangster films and the politics of change." Novos Olhares 9, no. 1 (July 10, 2020): 81–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.11606/issn.2238-7714.no.2020.172000.
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In this paper through a very close textual reading I will show the ideological differences between two films based on the life of Shanghai gangster Du Yuesheng (1888, Pudong – 1951, Hong Kong) through close formal and narrative analysis. Du was already a celebrity in his day in the Republican era and is still a con-troversial figure in Greater China. However, there are only two films based on the life of the French Con-cession opium kingpin, the recent Hong Kong/PRC co-production The Last Tycoon (Da Shang Hai, Wong Jing, 2012) and the epic two part Lord of the East China Sea I & II (Shang Hai huang di zhi: Sui yue feng yun & Shang Hai huang di zhi: Xiong ba tia xia, Hong Kong, Poon Man-kit 1993). I show how these films reflect HK's and China's politico-economic changes focusing on the representation of social class and the subject, depiction of internal migration and immigration, and nationalism. The films will be discussed in their relation to changes in the Hong Kong film industry, Chinese and world cinema and the transnational gangster genre, showing how local and global cinemas have affected these films.
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Zhou, Ziheng. "Flowing landscapes: Hong Kong leftist documentary films during the Cold War (1954–1979)." OOO "Zhurnal "Voprosy Istorii" 2022, no. 12-3 (December 1, 2022): 332–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.31166/voprosyistorii202212statyi96.
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Hong Kong leftist cinema took “landscape” as their theme to avoid the risks of censorship by the British Hong Kong authorities. These “landscapes” not only allowed viewers to project patriotic feelings, but also built a sense of community of destiny between Mainland China and Hong Kong. Sorting out the characteristics of leftist documentaries allows you to get a more complete picture of the view of Hong Kong's leftist culture.
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Lei, Chin-Pang. "The Memories of Journeys: Spatialization of Time in Wong Kar-wai’s Nostalgic Films." Arts 11, no. 4 (July 20, 2022): 72. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/arts11040072.
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There is usually an agenda behind the rewriting of history. As an acclaimed Hong Kong director, Wong Kar-wai has made several nostalgic films set in 1960s Hong Kong, namely, Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004). Relating to Hong Kongers’ anxiety over the 1997 handover, Wong’s films are part of a wider symptomatic cultural phenomenon in Hong Kong cinema. In his nostalgic films, time is often spatialized. With his constant interest in mobile space, such as hotels and trains, he creates an alternative perspective to question the grand narrative of history. In his reconstruction of the past, there is never any cultural purity or origin to revisit. Rather, the past is presented with itinerant characters, mobile space, and cultural ambivalence, enabling multiple narratives of history. Focusing on the use of space, this paper analyzes how Wong’s films engender a reflective form of nostalgia, and challenge both official history and the linear concept of time. Wong’s nostalgia, I argue, is not only a response to Hong Kong politics, but also a paradigmatic text illustrating nostalgic writing’s resistance to official historical discourses.
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Ma, Jiaxue. "Analysis of the Cultural Causes of Undercover Images in Hong Kong Action Movies after the New Wave Movement." Communications in Humanities Research 16, no. 1 (November 28, 2023): 163–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.54254/2753-7064/16/20230596.
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In the 1980s, the New Wave Movement opened up new space for Hong Kong cinema, providing opportunities for innovation and transformation of action films. Diversified action movies and characters tend to appear at this time. As a type of character with highly localized characteristics in Hong Kong, the complexity of undercover images helps people examine society from different perspectives. This paper reviews the development of undercover films in Hong Kong by selecting representative undercover films, and reveals that undercover is actually a reflection of the collective situation of social identity. Based on the concept of marginalized individuals, this paper finds through literature analysis and case analysis that the diverse types of undercover identities that emerged after the New Wave Movement not only reflect the survival dilemma of undercover agents themselves but also a true portrayal of the identity recognitions dilemma among Hong Kong people in the rapidly changing political and social trends.
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Sobel, Chan Ka Lok. "The Dynamic Aesthetics, Locality and Dehybrid Style of Hong Kong Cinema facing the Recovery of Post-Pandemic Period." AVANCA | CINEMA, no. 14 (January 5, 2024): 452–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.37390/avancacinema.2023.a530.
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This paper examines the revitalization of Hong Kong cinema in the post-pandemic era, focusing on the dynamic aesthetics, preservation of locality, and the emergence of a dehybrid style. By analyzing various contemporary Hong Kong films, this paper argues that the post-pandemic recovery period has facilitated new creative possibilities and a reconnection to the region’s unique cultural identity. The study also takes into account the historical trajectory of Hong Kong cinema, the impact of the global pandemic on Hong Kong film industry, and the sociopolitical factors that have shaped the industry’s response to these challenges.
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Stockbridge, Sally. "Sexual Violence & Hong Kong Films." Media Information Australia 74, no. 1 (November 1994): 86–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x9407400113.
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Changsong, Nam Wang, and Rohani Hashim. "How Chinese Youth Cinema Develops? Reviewing Chinese Youth Genre in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, 1950s-2000s." GATR Global Journal of Business Social Sciences Review 2, no. 1 (January 13, 2014): 54–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.35609/gjbssr.2014.2.1(7).
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Objective - This study considers Chinese youth cinema as a historical object that represents the gamut of social practices and styles of production. Methodology/Technique - The authors examine the historical development of young people for tracing how different social and historical contexts interpret the Chinese young people's world. Findings - The youth films produced in the major Chinese regions—Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong—illustrate how much social practices dominated the film content and style. For instance, youth genre in Hong Kong, once prevalent in the Cantonese cinema of the mid and late 1960s, blended musical and melodrama by dormant with the rise of martial art films. Novelty - This study attempts to elaborate some films featuring young people in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to review the histories of youth cinema in these Chinese regions. The Chinese youth film outlines how, in Chinese communities, the category of youth historically functions as a significant site of ideological inscription that displays its struggles towards an idealized future. Type of Paper: Review Keywords : Chinese cinema; Film history; Hong Kong; Mainland China; Taiwan; Youth genre
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Wu, Helena. "The making of the citizen-spectator in postmillennial Hong Kong: Authorial and spectatorial engagement with independent documentary films." Asian Cinema 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 191–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00055_1.
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Established by several independent filmmakers in Hong Kong in 1997, Ying E Chi (YEC) has facilitated the production and the distribution of Hong Kong independent films by means of VCD/DVD releases, video streaming, film festivals and community screenings. The non-profit body has played a key role in aiding local independent filmmakers’ projects, seeking film distribution opportunities locally and transnationally and building community networks in its home city. As the organizer of the Hong Kong Independent Film Festival since 2008, YEC has demonstrated its fluid translocal positioning by not just promoting the works of local filmmakers, but also introducing worldwide independent cinema to Hong Kong audiences. In retrospect, the development of YEC has reflected the transforming cultural landscape of Hong Kong to different degrees. From cinephiles and academics to the public, the audiences YEC has developed over the years indicates an ever-changing spectatorship in the making, bespeaking the various responses to the social environment under which these films were made, shown and watched. This article will use YEC as a case study to explore the mutual impacts between documentary films and their spectatorship which have shaped independent filmmakers’ production and distribution strategies continuously in postmillennial Hong Kong, particularly in the wake of the 2014 Umbrella Movement and the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement. The article will draw on interviews with local independent filmmakers, in order to understand how industry practices and dynamics have responded to identification, social events and audience behaviours over time. In this regard, spectatorship is understood as not just an embodied experience of film viewing, but also a series of affinities between the filmmaker, the audience and the film work. As a whole, the article will probe how the idea of citizen-spectator has evolved and has become inscribed in spectatorial engagement with independent documentary films, which has oscillated between audiences’ approval and authorities’ disapproval in postmillennial Hong Kong.
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Yeung, Jessica. "The ‘We’ in two pairs of documentaries about protests by The 70’s Biweekly syndicate and the 2019 Hong Kong Documentary Workers." Asian Cinema 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 161–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00053_1.
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In the history of Hong Kong, the two largest and most impactful waves of social movements took place in the 1960s–70s and in the 2010s. The two documentaries-pair, 香港保衛釣魚台示威 (The Protect Diao Yu Islands Protest in Hong Kong) (1971) and 給香港的文藝青年 (To Hong Kong Intellectual Youths) (1978) produced by the anarcho-pacifist 70年代雙週刊 (The 70’s Biweekly) syndicate, and 佔領立法會 (Taking Back the Legislature) (2020) and 理大圍城 (Inside the Red Brick Wall) (2020) produced by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers effectively construct a ‘We’ of the protesters in alliance in the Butlerian sense. In the case of the 2020 films, this ‘We’ is unwittingly expanded by the government by imposing censorship on them, thus creating another layer of alliance with some Hong Kongers who might not have even watched the films, but stand in solidarity with the filmmakers in defending freedom of expression.
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Yee, Winnie L. M. "The post-urban gaze and Hong Kong independent cinema: An ecofeminist perspective." Asian Cinema 30, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 219–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00005_1.
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The city has always been a prominent subject in Hong Kong cinema. Land has been seen only as a profitable commodity, controlled by property developers and the wealthy. Instead of exploring the countryside and the traditional farming and fishing villages, people shifted their focus to Hong Kong: its skyline became the only valid point of perception. This marginalization of nature, however, was challenged in 2008 during the dispute between the villagers of Choi Yuen village and the Hong Kong government regarding the construction of Guangzhou‐Hong Kong High-Speed Rail Link, which would demolish the village of 500 people that lay along its path. This article looks at Jessey Tsang’s documentary Flowing Stories (2014) and adopts an ecofeminist perspective on the ways in which Hong Kong’s cultural imaginary has been reinvented in films. The role of documentaries in the independent film scene will be reviewed, especially the social-issue documentaries that have become popular since 2008. An ecofeminist approach to our understanding of Hong Kong could shift the paradigm of our stagnant cultural imaginary ‐ the urban city ‐ and resituate Hong Kong in a closer connection with its surroundings and the world.
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Stockbridge, Sally. "Rape and representation: the regulation of Hong Kong films in Hong Kong and Australia." Asian Studies Review 17, no. 3 (April 1994): 43–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03147539408712949.
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Lee, Sangjoon. "Destination Hong Kong: The Geopolitics of South Korean Espionage Films in the 1960s." Journal of Korean Studies 22, no. 2 (September 1, 2017): 343–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/21581665-4226478.
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Abstract As the apparent progeny of Cold War politics in the West, espionage films witnessed unprecedented popularity around the globe in the 1960s. With the success of Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964)—along with French, Italian, and German copycats—in Asia, film industries in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea recognized the market potential and embarked on churning out their own James Bond-mimetic espionage films in the late 1960s. Since the regional political sphere has always been multifaceted, however, each country approached genre conventions with its own interpretation. In the US-driven Cold War political, ideological, and economic sphere, developmental states in the region, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, vigorously adopted anti-communist doctrine to guard and uphold their militant dictatorships. Under this political atmosphere in the regional sphere, cultural sectors in each nation-state, including cinema, voluntarily or compulsorily served as an apparatus to strengthen the state’s ideological principles. While the Cold War politics that drive the narrative in the American and European films is conspicuously absent in Hong Kong espionage films, South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, explicitly promulgated the ideological principles of their apparent enemies, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in their representative espionage films. This article casts a critical eye over South Korea–initiated inter-Asian coproduction of espionage films produced during the time, with particular reference to South Korea–Hong Kong coproduction of SOS Hong Kong (SOS Hongk’ong) and Special Agent X-7 (Sun’gan ŭn yŏngwŏnhi), both produced and released in 1966.
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Wu, Hang. "The Translocalized McDull Series: National Identity and the Politics of Powerlessness." Animation 12, no. 1 (March 2017): 28–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1746847716686550.
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The animated film Me & My Mum was released in mainland China and Hong Kong in 2014 and proved to be a huge box office hit, cashing in on the existing McDull animated films that are hailed as the best animations in Hong Kong. Previous scholarship suggests that the McDull animated film series is a symbol of Hong Kong local culture; it serves as a repository of the changing landscapes of Hong Kong and demonstrates hybrid identities. However, this article argues that the McDull animated film series is more translocal than local, a fact which reveals the dynamics of the Hong Kong–mainland China relationship after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The translocalized McDull series demonstrates an obsession with Chineseness which helps to evoke the national identity. By aestheticizing powerlessness as cuteness through anthropomorphic animals, the McDull series used to be highly political; they grappled with the wounds of society in Hong Kong. However, the articulation of a well-rounded McDull in the translocalized film Me & My Mum indicates that it is conforming to the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology of ideal children while the political power of aestheticizing powerlessness is repressed, revealing the dominant power of the Chinese film market.
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OKUNO, Shii. "Beyond Martial Arts in Hong Kong Films." Japanese Journal of Human Geography 56, no. 6 (2004): 615–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.4200/jjhg1948.56.615.
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Wai-Ming, Benjamin. "Japanese Elements in Hong Kong Erotic Films." Asian Cinema 15, no. 1 (March 1, 2004): 217–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac.15.1.217_1.
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Bren, Frank. "Connections and Crossovers: Cinema and Theatre in Hong Kong." New Theatre Quarterly 14, no. 53 (February 1998): 63–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x0001174x.
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From the run-up to its return to Chinese rule in July 1997 to the stock-market crash in October, Hong Kong has seldom been out of the news during the past year. But the attention paid to its political and economic provenance has not been matched by much interest in its cultural output – despite the existence in Hong Kong of a cinema industry with a prodigious output now approaching ten thousand films. Although a professional theatre has been a relatively more recent development, the connections between film and theatre in Hong Kong have always been close – from the film adaptations of Cantonese opera in the 1930s, through the ‘female’ films of the post-war period and the western following for Bruce Lee's kung fu movies, to the present dominance of the cross-generic production company, Springtime, in the 1990s, with a creative interest in its own past which verges on the metatheatrical. Frank Bren, who is presently living and working in Hong Kong, here captures something of the history and the distinctive flavour of the overlapping movie and theatre industries, and assesses why the relationship remains mutually profitable in artistic as well as economic terms.
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Yeung, Jessica Siu-yin. "“I wish my films would bring hopes to the spectators”." Archiv orientální 90, no. 3 (December 22, 2022): 565–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.47979/aror.j.90.3.565-574.
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Michael Hui received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 40th Hong Kong FilmAwards and the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts at the 15th Hong Kong ArtsDevelopment Awards. Hui was also featured as the “Filmmaker in Focus” at the 44thHong Kong International Film Festival. Although the South China Morning Post (2022),Art and Piece (2022), Michael Hui, Filmmaker in Focus (2020), Karen Fang (2018), and TimYoungs (2011) have also published interviews with Hui, they were more interested inthe biographical and the industrial aspects of Hui’s career. This interview focuses onHui’s insights into comedy’s versatility and how it consoles people in a time of gloom.
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Wei, Juntong. "Wong Kar-wai's Film Aesthetics: An Analysis of Chungking Express from the Perspective of Film Studies." Journal of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences 33 (June 17, 2024): 78–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.54097/hq19yz65.
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Chungking Express is a strong stroke in Hong Kong films, whether it is the choice of characters, the deep meaning of the shooting technique, the suspenseful metaphor or the subtle and rich emotion, all make this film bring a unique look and feel to the audience. Since its release in the 90s of the 20th centuries, Chungking Express has received wide attention in society and film academia and has also triggered a boom in appreciation and analysis by many audiences and critics. The external characteristics and internal significance of the film are still worth studying and reading in the 21st century. This paper will explore the narrative characteristics, color and composition of the Chungking Express in the film. Emotional and gender elements and other dimensions analyze Wong Kar-wai's early style and the charm of Hong Kong films' works in their heyday, analyze the practical application of Wong Kar-wai's film aesthetics and the distinctive vitality of some Hong Kong films under the influence of regional and contemporary backgrounds, and draw on their reference significance for films in the new era, based on the present, look to the future, learn from the experience of predecessors, tap the potential of new film elements, and help high-quality films to achieve great progress and development.
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Ingham, Mike, and Kenny K. K. Ng. "Introduction: Hong Kong independent documentaries and their visibility." Asian Cinema 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 117–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00050_2.
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In their general introduction to the present Special Issue the authors trace the origins of and motivation behind much of the independent documentary filmmaking produced in the city during a period of great sociopolitical turbulence, leading up to the tight censorship protocols put in place after the mainland government’s promulgation of the repressive National Security Law in 2020. With reference to the individual essays that comprise this volume, they chart the sudden and unprecedented rise of documentary filmmaking in Hong Kong following many decades of public indifference to the genre. Limited public and underground screenings that took place before absolute censorship measures were implemented in 2021 showed huge box-office demand for these topical films, reflecting images of ordinary Hong Kong people and their struggle for political representation. This opening essay introduces a range of essays and one interview, mostly in relation to specific films, dealing with the now-contentious coupling of documentary films or television broadcasts and democracy. As the essays indicate, some directors and producers of these observational and participatory documentaries are still active overseas and many of the films discussed can now only be screened outside Hong Kong. Nevertheless, they bear witness to a spirit of resilience and resistance as well as a deep-seated desire for a genuine democracy based on universal suffrage constantly reneged on by the city’s various rulers, from the colonial era until now.
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Lee, Joseph Tse-Hei. "Despair and hope: cinematic identity in Hong Kong of the 2000s." Social Transformations in Chinese Societies 13, no. 2 (September 5, 2017): 173–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/stics-04-2017-0010.
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Purpose The goal of this article is to examine the current trends of political cinema in postcolonial Hong Kong. Many leaders of the Hong Kong mainstream cinema have accepted the Chinese authoritarian rule as a precondition for expanding into the ever-expanding Mainland film market, but a handful of conscientious filmmakers choose to make political cinema under the shadow of a wealthy and descendant industry, expressing their desire for democracy and justice and critiquing the unequal power relations between Hong Kong and China. Design/methodology/approach This paper consults relevant documentary materials and cinematic texts to contextualize the latest development of political cinema in Hong Kong. It presents an in-depth analysis of the works of two local independent filmmakers Herman Yau and Vincent Chui. Findings This study reveals a glimpse of hope in the current films of Herman Yau and Vincent Chui, which suggests that a reconfiguration of local identity and communal relationship may turn around the collective despair caused by the oppressive measures of the Chinese authoritarian state and the end of the Umbrella Movement in late 2014. Research limitations/implications Despite the small sample size, this paper highlights the rise of cinematic localism through a closer look at the works of Hong Kong independent filmmakers. Practical implications This study reveals an ambivalent mentality in the Hong Kong film industry where critical filmmakers strive to assert their creativity and agency against the externally imposed Chinese hegemonic power. Originality/value This investigation is an original scholarly study of film and politics in postcolonial Hong Kong.
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Marchetti, Gina. "Handover Bodies in a Feminist Frame." Screen Bodies 2, no. 2 (December 1, 2017): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/screen.2017.020202.
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Hong Kong women have been taking up the camera to explore the changing nature of their identity. Linking the depiction of the gendered body with the demand for women’s rights as sexual citizens, several directors have examined changing attitudes toward women’s sexuality. Yau Ching, for example, interrogates the issues of sex work, the internet, and lesbian desire in Ho Yuk: Let’s Love Hong Kong (2002). Barbara Wong’s documentary, Women’s Private Parts (2001), however, uses the televisual talking head interview and observational camera to highlight the way women view their bodies within contemporary Chinese culture. By examining the common ground shared by these very different films, a vision of women’s sexuality emerges that highlights Hong Kong women’s struggle for full sexual citizenship.
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Ingham, Mike. "Too much reality? Reflections on the educational-observational film world of Tammy Cheung and Augustine Lam." Asian Cinema 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 147–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00052_1.
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My article reassesses the direct cinema documentaries of respected and influential documentarians, festival organizers and documentary teachers Tammy Cheung and Augustine Lam in the light of the profound changes Hong Kong has experienced since their work was produced and distributed in the first decade of the new millennium. The present commentary on their body of work is conceived primarily as a critical retrospective, although it seems highly like they will continue to make films in self-imposed exile related to the new Hong Kong diaspora. In this article I am interested in tracing a through-line in their work and connecting the subject-matter of their sociological documentaries with the profound changes that have taken place in Hong Kong society and culture over the past few years.
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Tsang, Gabriel F. Y. "Masculine Performance in Hong Kong Crime Films from Post-Bruce to the 2000s." Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature 4, no. 2 (December 31, 2017): 73–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.18034/ajhal.v4i2.319.
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Masculinity, in Lacan’s sense, is an imagination. To specifically theorise Chinese masculinity, Kam Louie examined the elements of wen (cultural attainment) and wu (martial valour) rendered through historical or artistic images, and Song Geng and Derek Hird guide the discussions about Chinese manhood represented in everyday life. With a Marxist perspective, Lo Kwai Cheung illustrated the dissolvability of Chinese masculinity under international capitalism. With reference to Aristotle, it is supposed that Chinese masculinity, similar to ‘tragicity’ in nature, can be represented through imitating actions and hence be perceived. Based on Aristotle’s understanding, we can regard actions as ‘iterable’ media (like Derrida’s understanding of written texts) which engender performances according to the genealogy of quantitative mimesis.
Integrating theoretical discussions with a chronological approach, my full paper will go through following points in order to summarise the changes in Hong Kong crime films from the post-Bruce Lee era to the 2000s: (1) Hong Kong crime film inherited the martial side of masculinity from action films and became a popular genre since A Better Tomorrow was well received in the mid-1980s. (2) Many directors diversified the interpretation of crime in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but remained a focus on the strength, nimbleness and boldness of men. (3) After the decline of Hong Kong film industry for several years, Infernal Affairs’s success renewed the representation of manhood. (4) From the 2000s to now, male characters in crime films are preferably intelligent and wisely-romantic, like the fragile scholar in ancient China. (5) While globalisation seems to be eliminating the Chineseness of Chinese masculinity, I argue that geographical specificity and different speed of cultural development lead to the impossibility of synchronic masculine similarity. (6) Through a brief discussion concerning Hollywood’s adaptation of Hong Kong films, I argue that local masculinity is not transformable.
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Marchetti, Gina. "Documentary and democracy: An interview with Evans Chan." Asian Cinema 33, no. 2 (October 1, 2022): 257–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ac_00059_7.
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Gina Marchetti’s interview with NewYork-based Hong Kong independent filmmaker Evans Chan took place after Chan had said goodbye to his former home and to nearly three decades of filmmaking in the city, following the introduction of Hong Kong’s National Security Law in 2020. Her interview focuses on Chan’s non-fiction filmmaking, particularly his recent films dealing with Hong Kong’s two protest movements of 2014 and 2019, namely Raise the Umbrellas 撐傘 () and We Have Boots 我們有雨靴 (). While the latter part of the interview concerns Chan’s thoughts on the relationship between documentaries and democracy, it also explores the signature aesthetics of his films and an underlying ‘story of Hong Kong’, which the interviewer sees as a consistent thread running through his fiction and non-fiction filmography. A wide range of cinematic, literary, sociopolitical and philosophical influences in his work emerge in the course of this in-depth interview with the filmmaker.
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Guo, Moshan. "From a critical perspective: The defects of Hong Kong comedy since the 1950s." International Journal of Arts and Humanities 3, no. 1 (2022): 101–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.25082/ijah.2022.01.003.
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This paper elucidates the defects of Hong Kong comedy since the 1950s with regard to five aspects: the inflexibility of structure, the obviousness of theme, the drawback of the plot, the slapstick style and the vulgarity of taste. The story and the characters are relatively stereotypical and rigid in terms of structure. The dialogue and the camera angles are straightforward and obvious in the way that they express the theme. With regard to the plot, the structural design is simplistic and lacking in depth and nuance. Their characteristic slapstick style is expressed through the liveliness and nonsense of folk discourse. They are typically in vulgar taste, which finds expression in the customs, imagery and language of carnivalesque civic culture. The Hong Kong comedy genre has a very strong aesthetic tradition and has performed brilliantly in a commercial sense, but filmmakers need to acknowledge and reflect on its shortcomings, with a view to improving the aesthetic quality of Hong Kong comedy films specifically and Chinese comedy films more generally.
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Hudson, Dale. "Modernity as Crisis: Goeng Si and Vampires in Hong Kong Cinema (translation into Russian)." Corpus Mundi 2, no. 4 (December 27, 2021): 112–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.46539/cmj.v2i4.55.
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This article is a translation of a chapter from the collective monograph Draculas, vampires, and other undead forms: essays on gender, race, and culture, edited by John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart (2009, Scarecrow Press). The author analyzes the question of how Hong Kong cinema responds to the complex situation of Hong Kong's transition from its status as a British territory on loan to a special territory with extended autonomy within the PRC. As a marker pointing to the crisis development of this process, the Chinese people's particular ideas about the so-called “goeng si” (“jumping corpses”) were chosen. These revived corpses move in a peculiar jumping way, due to which they received this name. According to the author, in the images of these creatures, as well as in the cinematic vampires that have become an integral part of films made by Hong Kong studios, all the contradictions of the cultural and political situation in Hong Kong are manifested as in a mirror. Despite the fact that Hong Kong was able to actively oppose the global cinema represented by Hollywood, it had to adjust to the global cinematic trends in which vampires played an important role. All of this led to a certain hybridity of images that combined both Western and Chinese traits.
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Gleason, Timothy R., Qi Tang, and Jean Giovanetti. "Wong Kar-Wai." Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 12, no. 2 (December 31, 2002): 291–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/japc.12.2.06gle.
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Wong Kar-Wai is the premier auteur of Hong Kong cinema. This article analyzes his 1994 film, Chungking Express, using the auteur as structure approach. This approach emphasizes the influence of the director on a film. It can only be applied to films that were mainly controlled by the director and not the studio or production company. Using this approach requires researchers to find the signature of the director within the film. This research introduces the work of an internationally-acclaimed film director to communication scholars, and it deciphers a film inherently complex to interpret. The authors analysis reveals Wong utilizes a French New Wave style to represent his view of a Hong Kong undergoing social and political transformations. Wongs style is similar to French directors such as Truffaut and Godard because of his spontaneity and use of movement within the movie image. Even though Wong is influenced by the French New Wave, his films are also influenced by their physical and social environments. This is especially true in Chungking Express, with its crime urban surroundings, and constant references to expiration dates, the latter referring to Hong Kongs hand-over to China.
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Zhang, Yingjin. "Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. By Poshek Fu. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 288 pp. £14.95. ISBN 0804745188.]." China Quarterly 180 (December 2004): 1111–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s030574100432076x.
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Despite its short length (152 pages excluding reference matters), this pioneering study in English of “the Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus” in Chinese cinema succeeds in placing wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong cinemas in specific (albeit not always “proper” as Poshek Fu claims (p. xvi)) institutional and industrial contexts, bringing to light the “humanity” of the filmmakers, the “multiplicity of the historical situations,” and the “complexity of the cultural politics” of filmmaking and film criticism (p. xv). Most impressive of all is Fu's dedication to primary research, reading hard-to-find print materials as well as conducting interviews and watching rare films. The book's incredibly rich information (e.g. studio assets, production costs, ticket prices) will certainly interest scholars of modern Chinese history and culture, and Fu's accessible stories should attract general readers as well.After a preface outlining Fu's aims, chapter one, “Mapping Shanghai cinema under semi-occupation,” traces the rise of Zhang Shankun's Xinhua Company in Shanghai and reveals the ambiguities, contradictions and ironies of “Solitary Island cinema” between 1937 and 1941 – a cinema that defied political boundaries and thrived against odds. Chapter two, “Between nationalism and colonialism,” based on Fu's similarly-titled previous study (in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Fu and David Desser (2000)), discusses Hong Kong's “double marginality” between “Sinocentric” nationalism and British colonialism, and critiques the “Central Plains syndrome” in Shanghai filmmakers stranded in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. Against the Chinese syndrome, Fu asserts, Cantonese films like Southern Sisters (1940) articulated “a both/and hybridity” constitutive of a new “local consciousness” or emergent identity (p. 87). Chapter three, “The struggle to entertain,” derives from Fu's previous article (“The ambiguity of entertainment: Chinese cinema in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942 to 1945,” Cinema Journal, 37.1 (Fall 1997)) and argues against a binary view of either/or (e.g. resistance/collaboration, patriots/traitors). Fu depicts “occupation cinema” as a space of entertainment for the colonized to “escape from Japanese propaganda” (p. xiv), although the both/and logic also compels him to note the paradox that occupation cinema ultimately “helped normalize and naturalize the everyday violence of the occupation” (p. 131). In an epilogue, “Filming Shanghai in Hong Kong,” Fu goes through the changing political–economic situations in post-war Shanghai and Hong Kong.
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Hu, Gigi T. Y. "Reaction to Hong Kong—made films in Southeast Asia." Media Asia 25, no. 2 (January 1998): 98–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01296612.1998.11727174.
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Ke, Cui. "On Hong Kong Urban Space in Ann Hui’s Films." Film，Television and Theatre Review 4, no. 1 (2024): 64–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.35534/fttr.0401007.
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Kumar, Rebecca. "“You're in the Middle of the World”." liquid blackness 8, no. 1 (April 1, 2024): 44–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/26923874-11005952.
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Abstract Despite Barry Jenkins's pronounced and intentional allusions to the work of Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar Wai, film scholars have generally made little of the pervasive Asian elements in Moonlight (2016). This essay, however, offers a sustained study of the film's aesthetic and political engagement with Wong's cinema. It highlights how the distinct Asian femininity, or ornamentalism, of Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love (2001) are translated into Moonlight and reinforce the film's key themes on Black queerness, especially its ontological implications for Black (non)being and its material implications for Black embodiment. Furthermore, this essay claims that by borrowing from films in which Wong visually explores postcolonial loss—especially Happy Together (1997), about a pair of queer male Hong Kong migrants who work and live in Buenos Aires—Jenkins emphasizes the historic and global magnitude of queer Black diasporic dislocation and humanlessness. Ultimately, this essay outlines how the convergence of Black and Asian forms in Moonlight disrupts white, liberal, humanist scripts on racial, gendered, and sexual formation.
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Gan, Wendy. "Tropical Hong Kong: Narratives of absence and presence in Hollywood and Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 1960s." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29, no. 1 (March 2008): 8–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00316.x.
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Piocos, Carlos. "At Home in Public: Intimacy and Belonging among Filipina and Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong in Ani Ema Susanti’s Effort for Love (2008) and Moira Zoitl’s Exchange Square (2007)." Plaridel 16, no. 2 (2019): 161–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.52518/2020.16.2-07piocos.
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This article discusses how Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong claim and transform transnational sites as portrayed in Ani Ema Susanti’s 2008 short documentary film Mengusahakan Cinta [Effort for Love] and Moira Zoitl’s documentary video series Exchange Square (2007). The films depict how Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers negotiate precarious working and living conditions by deploying forms of intimacy, through their social practices and alternative sexualities, that enable them to gain agency in finding their own community and sense of belonging. This article argues that while their relationship to both private and public spaces in Hong Kong is transformed, these migrant women also actively transgress the borders of private and public spheres and personal and political realms.
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Marchetti, Gina. "The gendered politics of sex work in Hong Kong cinema." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 10 (December 16, 2015): 12–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.10.01.
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The portrayal of women as prostitutes is common in Hong Kong cinema, and filmmakers have looked at sex work from various perspectives: as a social problem, as an index of women’s economic exploitation more generally, as a way to explore the relationship between economics and sexuality, as a window onto the world of sexual minorities and as erotica. Scriptwriter Elsa Chan, working in conjunction with director Herman Yau, has made two features about women in the Hong Kong sex industry—Whispers and Moans (性工作者十日談, 2007) and True Women for Sale(性工作者2 我不賣身·我賣子宮, 2008)—based on Chan’s anthropological studies of women in the sex industry in Hong Kong. Like their earlier collaboration From the Queen to the Chief Executive (等候董建華發落, 2001), these films look at the “sensational” (youth murders, prostitution) with an eye to understanding and, perhaps, remedying social injustice. In fact, the issue of “justice” and women’s role as exploited victims as well as potential agents of change link Elsa Chan’s scripts to the interests of other women filmmakers currently working in Hong Kong. Whispers and Moans and True Women for Sale offer a critical perspective on the circulation of women across borders and gesture toward a feminist intervention into the shadow economy between transnational capitalism and the socialist marketplace in China.
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Teo, Stephen. "The aesthetics of mythical violence in Hong Kong action films." New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 8, no. 3 (January 1, 2011): 155–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ncin.8.3.155_1.
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Poon, Erica Ka-yan. "Lucilla You Min and Her Embodiment of a Cosmopolitan Fantasy." Feminist Media Histories 5, no. 1 (January 1, 2019): 113–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2019.5.1.113.
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Lucilla You Min, who acted in Japanese and Hong Kong coproduced films in the early 1960s, is a valuable case study for postwar East Asian border-crossing star studies. This article conceptualizes the body of the star as a site of constructed meaning, and argues that You Min's embodiment of cosmopolitan fantasy as constructed by the studios she worked for was fraught with corporate and cultural competition in the Cold War era. The first part examines how Japanese cinema's discourses of publicity constructed You Min's embodiment of the imaginary of tōyō—an expression of Japan's desire for a leadership role in mediating between Asia and the West. The second part analyzes how Hong Kong cinema constructed the imaginary of the cosmopolitan, embodied by You Min's seemingly natural adaptability in world travel.
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Moreno García, Luis Damián. "Subtitling Hong Kong Code-Mixing and Code-Switching." Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 11, no. 2 (April 26, 2024): 161–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i2.1155.
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Translation has largely been considered a process involving only two languages, source and target. However, plurilingual audiovisual content has proliferated over the last few decades, reflecting, as a result, the world’s linguistic intermingling. Such a plurality complicates both theoretical categorizations and translation practices. Even though multilingualism in the media has received scholarly attention, more explorations are needed to ascertain the translation processes and methods adopted to handle linguistically diverse source texts in the streaming era. The present piece of research tentatively explores the treatment given to Cantonese and English code-mixing and code-switching present in Hongkonese films and TV shows currently streamed on Netflix, the video-on-demand platform. This article probes a selection of such content and compares the original dialogues with official Chinese, English and Spanish subtitles. Preliminary results point towards a loss of linguistic diversity and nuance caused by subtitling processes. The differentiated roles that both languages originally play in creating comedic, stylistic, or emphatic effects are rarely retained, possibly affecting viewers’ reception and appreciation. This article argues that further attention should be paid to the translation and adaptation of code-mixing and code-switching present in Hongkonese creations, both by the industry and academia, if such a multilingual reality is to be portrayed successfully via subtitles.
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유경철. "The Study on Korea-Hong Kong Co-Produced Martial Arts Films." JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES ll, no. 38 (November 2012): 291–321. http://dx.doi.org/10.26585/chlab.2012..38.013.
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Tan, S. "Chinese diasporic imaginations in Hong Kong films: Sinicist belligerence and melancholia." Screen 42, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 1–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/screen/42.1.1.
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Chen, Hazel Shu. "Acoustically Embodied." Prism 18, no. 1 (March 1, 2021): 114–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922217.
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Abstract In 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong, radio permeated in everyday life as a major source of entertainment and information. It subsequently gave rise to a peculiar genre in Cantonese cinema, film adaptations of “airwave novels” (tiankong xiaoshuo dianying 天空小說電影), which flourished in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. According to the records of the Hong Kong Film Archive, from 1949 to 1968 there were ninety-three film adaptations of radio novels and dramas. Besides drawing the historical contours of the radio-film network in the postwar colonial city, this article studies two exemplary radio stories-turned-films, Niehai chihun 孽海痴魂 (A Devoted Soul; 1949) and Cimu lei 慈母淚 (A Mother's Tears; 1953), and scrutinizes their transmedial/transnational adaptation trajectories to shed light on intermedia aesthetic criticisms. This article describes how film technology reconstituted the oral and spoken in audiovisual space, in particular the embodiment and representation of the radio acoustic. The voice-over, indicative of the radio unconscious in the film, registers the existence of a consciousness already programmed by radio sounds that reconfigures the economy of filmic diegesis. This article further investigates how such medium self-reflexivity in the form of voice-overs destabilized the Manichean structure of melodrama as an established genre in Cantonese cinema, thus making space for forms of female agency amidst contending ideologies in early Cold War.
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Wang, Weida. "Ruptured Rhetoric." Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 4, no. 3 (2023): 225–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/res.2023.4.3.225.
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Under the pressure of the political environment, Chinese immigrant communities of a new sort have had to form in the UK. From 2020 to 2022, strict COVID-19 policies enforced by the Chinese government left a large number of Chinese nationals stranded overseas. Concurrently, the political conflicts in Hong Kong since 2019 and shifting geopolitical dynamics in China prompted a significant influx of Hong Kong citizens emigrating to the UK. Within this context, soundwork has emerged as a powerful implement for shaping ideology, aesthetics, identity, and subjectivity in these immigrant and diaspora communities. Amid these challenges, ethnic Chinese sound artists based in the UK actively contribute to the construction of Sinophone communities, incorporating the local culture while challenging the homogenized concept of “Chineseness” in terms of a new, critical epistemology. These Sinophone communities take place in venues such as performance spaces, art galleries, and public areas. Artistic activism plays a pivotal role, with sound art serving as a potent medium of expression. Artists such as Chris Zhongtian Yuan, Bo Choy, Yarli Allison, and On Yee Lo employ various forms of artistic expression, including video arts, installations, films, and performances, to capture the political circumstances and psychological states of these communities. By drawing on theoretical frameworks from Sinophone theory and sound studies, this paper analyzes the soundworks of four artists of the Chinese ethnic or Hong Kong diaspora based in London, focusing particularly on the protest, storytelling, ritual, resistance, nostalgia, and mythological elements in their works’ sonic effects.