This study explores the intense debates surrounding how this new cultural infrastructure should play its role in the heritagization of Cantonese opera, specifically related to the transmission of cultural heritage of traditional Chinese theatre. This study uses internet-based surveys, semi-structured interviews with the public and cultural heritage professionals (CHPs), and interviews with experts (including scholars and maestros of traditional Chinese theatre) as data sources. The results revealed that factors of (1) aesthetics and artistry, (2) cultural identity, and (3) publicity and internationalization have contributed to public perception of this significant cultural infrastructure in Hong Kong. This study’s findings shed new light on how institutionalization of Cantonese opera interacts with cultural, social, and political factors, for example, by examining how Hong Kong’s unique historical relationship with China and the West has played a role in the heritagization process. Further, the perceptions of the public and CHPs on the Xiqu Center may have many implications for the future cultural development and transmission of cultural heritage in Hong Kong as they reflect people’s cultural literacy, values, and identity. This study’s findings may help cultural officials and administrators, CHPs, and policymakers better understand the phenomenon of heritagization and how to transmit traditional Chinese art and elevate it to its rightful place on the international stage.

This project draws extensively on primary sources such as paintings, photographs, local gazetteers, topographical gazetteers, guidebooks, magazines and newspapers, investigating the correlation between the tourism industry and visual representations of scenic sites in modern China. Using scenic sites as the point of entry, this research will be divided into two parts with a focus on three scenic sites, namely Mount Huang, Mount Yandang and Mount Tiantai. These sites were selected because they were promoted as the most representative scenic attractions in south-eastern China by the Nationalist government, and were regarded as the most popular subjects for landscape painting by the Republican art world. The first part of the project will trace the ‘sacralisation’ and commoditisation of these sites during the Republican period by closely examining the role played by the Nationalist government and other institutions in the process and analysing the discursive practices that have constructed the meanings and values surrounding the tourism industry and scenic sites. The second part will look into the visual representations of these sites within the context set by the first part of the project, aiming to offer a comprehensive and clearer picture of the interaction between scenic sites, tourism, nationalism and the visual arts, and highlight the dynamic visual culture and its correlation with nation building in Republican China. Adopting current theories on tourism and landscape, the project attempts to bring forward the two understudied areas, the tourism industry and travel landscape painting, in the hopes of filling in the gaps from existing research and advancing our understanding of the social history of travel landscape painting.

Analyzing the burgeoning and digitally-enhanced representations of the nonhuman worlds and characters in contemporary Chinese film, television and animation, this proposed project offers a new reading of fantasy media as an aesthetic experience of the Anthropocene. The proposed project contributes to existing studies in three ways. First, this project expands on recent scholarship on cinema and the Anthropocene by stressing the more-than-human dimension of Chinese fantasy cinema, which constructs or calls into question the meaning of human and humanity. It also supplements the existing scholarship on Chinese ecocinema, which tends to focus on documentaries or fictions that rely on realism as a major aesthetic repertoire. Second, by focusing on contemporary Chinese qihuan/fantasy media that engages the supernatural and the non-human, the project not only offers a discussion that complements as well as contrasts with the fantastic genre in the Euro-American context; it also offers a historically informed vision on the Chinese fantastic in the context of century-long censorship of the supernatural on Chinese screens in the name of modernity and progress. Exploring the imagination of the fantastic in the Chinese context, the project enriches the understanding of the Anthropocene, currently a predominantly Western concept that deals with periodization of the planet as a result of Western-styled modernization. Third, Digitizing the non-human delves into how digital technology, especially CGI, is not just a supportive tool but an active force influencing how we imagine our condition of the Anthropocene. In particular, it examines the cultural meanings of digital visual effects and animation in the context of the Anthropocene. 

In order to gain a better understanding of kinsei tō’on, the PI intends to investigate three types of 17th-century musicological materials that happen to speak to the variations of tō’on mentioned above. The three materials are: (1) Gishi Gakufu; (2) Tōkō Kinfu (3) Zenrin Kajyū. The PI attempts to revisit phonological systems of kinsei tō’on as seen in these scores, particularly the nature, expression of voiced consonants and entering tones, and their tone-melody relationships. This is also the first attempt to reconstruct the tone values of tō’on with the aid of musical scores.

It is believed that this project will reinforce the complexity of kinsei tō’on and shed light on its tone values, not to mention a detailed comparison of kinsei tō’on and Ming Mandarin. With the same methodology, similar attempts of reconstructing the tone values of chūsei tō’on (also known as sō'on), which was introduced to Japan during the Kamakura period (1185-1333), will be deemed possible.

PXM and HNM are prime examples of what Winford (2005) called ‘borrowing’ and ‘imposition’ respectively. This project investigates the phonological and lexical changes induced by borrowing and imposition through systematic comparisons of PXM and HNM. Our goals are to reconstruct the contact history of these two clusters of Min and to verify contact-induced phonological and lexical changes in them. The project consists of 3 phases. First, PXM and HNM will be reconstructed. The reconstructed forms of the dialects, as opposed to their modern forms, will form the basis of our subsequent analyses. Second, PXM and HNM will be examined in the light of Winford’s (2005) suggestion that changes resulted from imposition are more systematic and predictable than those resulted from borrowing. If the suggestion is valid, phonological and lexical changes will be more systematic and predicable in HNM than PXM. Third, we will investigate whether type of transfer (i.e. borrowing vs imposition) is a factor affecting the borrowability and the borrowability scale of loanwords, as seen in the cases of PXM and HNM. This project will offer new perspectives on the formation and development of Southern Chinese dialects, in which language contact plays an important role.

It argues that this period of the city’s film history was defined by “criminal realism”. This concept alludes on the one hand to the extent to which depictions of Hong Kong’s social reality (including crime) were anxiously policed by colonial censors, and on the other hand to the way crime films tended (and still tend) to confound and transgress critical definitions of realism. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book deals with several neglected topics in the study of Hong Kong cinema, including the evolving generic landscape of the crime film prior to the 1980s, the influence of colonial film censorship on the genre, and the prominence and contestation of “realism” in the local history of the crime film.

This funerary practice of excarnation, has been consistently practiced by the majority of the community in Bombay-Mumbai as one of the most important Zoroastrian rituals to be performed. The towers and the mortuary infrastructure are supported through communal giving and the instrument of the charitable trust. As merchant trade and the British Empire brought Parsis to settle in various entrepots, they brought with them these funerary rites, which actually established many early forms of communal associations in the diaspora. While many settlements (Hong Kong, Delhi) moved toward cemeteries to bury the dead where excarnation was unviable, the existing literature on Zoroastrian funerals, continues to focus solely on dokhmenashini, and hence there is no scholarship on the ritual adaptations performed with burials and other alternatives.

In contrast, this project broadens the focus and wishes to ethnographically investigate the practices associated with cemetery burials and a very recent move to cremation, as well as the finance supporting these alternate mortuary infrastructures. Due to the unviability of excarnation in the present even the Parsis in Mumbai are now moving away from dokhmenashini and seeking alternatives. This research will investigate how this transition away from millennia old ritual practice is not simply due to the reduced viability of excarnation outside of a few places, but also due to the newly acquired financial and political strength of diaspora groups particularly Hong Kong and the UK within the global Zoroastrian community.