This panel delves into informal cultural practices that have emerged in the complex political and social landscape of Hong Kong. These cultural practices are produced outside of governmental and institutional domains, and encompass independent cinema, art projects, socially engaged art and public monuments. They also offer alternative approaches to preserving and transmitting personal and/or collective memories in a resilient and reflective manner. Galileo Cheng’s paper examines how the experimental documentary film Blue Island (2022) uses re-enactment of personal memoirs to counter canon narratives and build a space for activism among Hong Kong’s diasporic communities through the transmission of individuals’ memories and emotions. Evelyn Char analyzes how Hong Kong artist Law Yuk-mui’s Song of the Exile (2022) – a work of improvised cinema on migration and diaspora across Asia – unmoors Hong Kong from the margins of empires and proposes an alternative, deterritorializing geographic imaginary of the city. wen yau’s paper discusses how the different versions of the Goddess of Democracy statues in Hong Kong serve as counter-monuments of national identity and shape public memory and political aspirations. Clara Cheung offers insights into how painting has been used to recover the voices and subjectivity of politically suppressed individuals after their traumatic experiences in social movements. Together, these papers offer a multifaceted exploration of Hong Kong’s informal cultural practices, highlighting their significance as a means of producing counter-hegemonic narratives, fostering resilience, and recovering memories especially after traumatizing experiences.
