๐ RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
๐ RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILM
Eddie Tay, Hong Kong as Creative Practice, Palgrave, 2022. 110 pgs.
Clik here to view.
The Palgrave Macmillan series that Eddie Tayโs Hong Kong as Creative Practice is part of is a platform for expert synopses of currents in contemporary thought and creativity. I am an artist and writer, not a scholar. I read Tayโs book, which explores Hong Kongโs present psychological topography, to see todayโs Hong Kong through the eyes of a long-term creative resident. What, after all that Hong Kong has witnessed in the past few years, from protests to pandemic, inspires an artist and scholar like Eddie Tay? How does he continue to take street photos, to write, and think critically about his city?
โFor academics working in the humanities,โ Tay concludes in Hong Kong as Creative Practice, โit is increasingly clear that the personal is the professionalโ. His Hong Kong landscape is a haunted one, where everyday experiences include the spectres of capitalism, consumerism, social disparities, political and health crises, as well as continual intercultural and intra-cultural reassessments. It is also his home. โThere is a need for humanities research,โ he states, โto orient itself toward combining the experiential with the conceptual via creative interventionsโ. โWe live in a world that is increasingly fraught and fragmented,โ Tay also argues. He believes that through the use of contemporary research models and creative practices, โwe are brought back to ourselvesโ.
Tay is present and indivisible in Hong Kong. He is photographer and poet, professor and scholar, father, husband, friend, neighbour, advocate, critic, both solitary and part of a community. I am, like Tay, enthusiastic about walking and cycling through the landscape of cities and the areas adjoining them. I also seek the convenience, but not the control, offered by public transport. I want agency to observe and consciously invest meaning in the everyday life of urban and near-urban spaces that I live in. I care about and want to understand more deeply the contrasting liminal spaces of a city and its edges. How do I experience, as an artist and writer, my private life, nearby neighbourhoods, nature (parks and roadsides), and the consumer-driven public architecture (malls, markets) that I move through?
These questions interest me and I found them pondered and echoed in Hong Kong as Creative Practice, which provides a welcome exploration of thinking and seeing through the familiar lens of residence. It is a well-researched account of life in an iconic city. Most importantly, itโs written by a very good poet and street photographer currently living there. It both presents a self-meditation and conjures the psychological world in which that self, an artist and poet, exists as a scholar. It is a world not so much defined by the authorโs differences as by his heightened awareness of the ordinariness of his actions (walking, riding a bicycle with his kids). While anchored in aesthetic thoughts and things that resonate with the author as both a scholar and poet, the book is never far from Tayโs ordinary lifeโhis family life, the streets he regularly visits, recreational pursuits.
The book requires some familiarity with recent philosophical and psychological social trends, as well as historical precedents to those trends. Tay includes extensive bibliographies of works cited at the end of each chapter. As a practising artist, I was particularly drawn to the works mentioned by Walter Benjamin (The Arcades Project), Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life), Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society) and Sarah Pink (Doing Sensory Ethnography).
Also, when reading Tayโs book, I needed to reference a map of Hong Kong. I am an outsider and, to follow the authorโs thought, I needed to know his geography. I needed to see it in my mindโs eye. A map helped me to follow streets, enter neighbourhoods, locate sightlines in photos, to journey with Tay through physical distances and psychological interconnectedness. We walk with Tay through Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloonโs frenetic harbour district, the malls and park of Sha Tin along the Shing Mun River, back to Kowloon for a dรฉrive through the Sham Shui Po district, board and observe subway passengers, then cycle through Tai Mai Tuk and along the dam at Ma On Shan, ending up near Tayโs home in a New Territories village.
I miss Tayโs poetry in these pages. Itโs his poetry that has and remains a place of so many conjoining spacesโcommunal, private, present, conjectural. The time travellerโs flรขneur lives and walks, eats and sleeps within his poems. But this is not that kind of book. And while I respect his scholarly researcher self, Tayโs photography is absolutely essential here. His street photos are what ground the bookโs arguments, present visually his approach to ordinary experience, illustrate how the creative practices of poetry and art impact contemporary theory. Tayโs photographs resonate with the spaces where his particular Hong Kong self resides. The photographs here do the work required of them, linking practising artist to critical thinker. Without them, the book would falter.
I do not think this work will appeal to everyone interested in Hong Kong or in street photography. It is written in a relatively dense and theoretical style. But underneath, if you take the time to carefully read it, you sense a quiet revolution, the awareness that, even in environments that control or channel us, our expectations, our ways of moving through them, the individual can still summon feelings of separation or belonging.
Does this work add to Hong Kong studies? Yes, definitely. Tayโs decades-long presence in the city offers both historical insight and a healthy subjectivity to his observations. Since the book relies on extensive materials from a variety of disciplines, it possibly opens a door for further research from a diversity of viewpoints. I hope Hong Kong as Creative Practice provokes other artist and writers, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, inspiring them to explore the tender tentacles that creativity nourishes and extends into changing urban environments.
How to cite: McDonald, Marsha. โOne Senses a Quiet Revolution: Eddie Tayโs Hong Kong as Creative Practice.โ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/18/hong-kong-creative.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Marsha McDonald lives in Vilar de Andorinho, Portugal. An artist and writer, she works and exhibits between North America, Europe, and Asia. She has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner, Puffin, Mary Nohl (travel), Lynden Sculpture Garden, Gallery 224 Artservancy (artist working within conserved land in Wisconsin USA), and a New York Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Otoliths (Australia), The Drum and The Cantabrigian (Cambridge MA), Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Cha (Hong Kong), and La Piccioleta Barca (Milan). She has collaborated with artists and writers in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Portugal, North America, and Japan. In 2024, she will be an arts resident at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and Studio Kura in Kyushu, Japan. Visit her website for more information. [All contributions by Marsha McDonald.]