Things Are Not As They Seem

In this studio we explored the landscape of Hong Kong through the places, nonplaces, boundaries, and mirages of local writer Dung Kai-cheung’s experimental literary work, Atlas. Paying particular attention to Dung’s history of Hong Kong cartography, student’s sharpened their representational toolset for mapping territories in time and space. Moving from boundaries to human bodies, the studio emphasized the importance of scale to the development of successful projects, and used aspects of the text to illuminate the hidden dimensions of actual and fictional physical locations in Hong Kong. Rigorous research was undertaken into the past and present of specific streets and places around the territory. Spatial concepts such as edge, boundary and place, were explored to rethink the landscape of what Dung Kai-cheung calls the ‘imaginary city’.