Inertia Reels: Mobility in Hong Kong video

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2002 by Joan Kee

It is hard to live in Hong Kong without becoming obsessed with mobility. One's status is measured by one's ability to migrate, travel, send one's children to elite boarding schools or maintain a residence abroad. The landmarks of Hong Kong, if they can be designated as such, are banks that facilitate the movement of capital, like I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower, Sir Norman Foster's Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building, or modes of transport such as the Mid-Levels escalator or the Star Ferry. Mobility is largely configured as movement, and moving and transience, as a result, is the norm. Those who come to live in Hong Kong tend to do so because of persecution in their original home or, more commonly, because of economic ambition or necessity. As a result of such migration, the city has gradually become the quintessential expression, or perhaps caricature, of a kind of globalization most commonly associated with the exchange of capital. The space of Hong Kong epitomizes the transactional nature of globalization, and the portlike mentality of which Ackbar Abbas has written at eloquent length is made obvious in the ceaseless flow of goods and services. (1) The temporary is pervasive, even endemic, and as Christina Chu of the Hong Kong Art Museum points out, there is no commitment to the city as a home; everyone is here to get what they want and they eventually leave. (2) Even those who were born and raised in Hong Kong (the vast majority of the city's inhabitants fall into this category), it seems, are always on the search for privilege, usually translated into migration abroad.

In such a space, an understanding of mobility beyond the process of getting from one point to another seems absent. It is simply enough to engage in this process and hopefully, partake of the privileges embedded therein. Yet the lack of any examination of the reasons or ramifications of this kind of mobility strikes one as problematic. One can easily travel to multiple locations and destinations from Hong Kong, but such portability of the self merely touches upon the surface of mobility. It does not translate into or account for an ability to negotiate disparate contexts and spatialities, a critical facet of the elusive idea and practice of mobility. Indeed, this surface mobility arguably points to Hong Kong as a space of erasure, as the tracks of arrival and inevitable departure seems to efface the impact that any individual might have on this space.

Reflective of the actual spaces of the city, the video spaces that delineate the site of Hong Kong mirror this display of symptoms of the obsession with mobility. But the spaces as defined in these works often act as critiques of the single-mindedness of such obsession or, at the very least, depict mobility as a difficult and elusive condition. The video spaces of Hong Kong tend to revolve around fastness as a primary theme, and especially the excesses of such fastness, which is at the crux of the obsession with mobility. Here fastness, rather than speed, is more to the point for although Hong Kong has been popularly read as a site built on speed, these readings inevitably focus on acceleration and condensed time, characteristics of fastness as opposed to speed. Fastness is a highly differentiated quality encompassing slowness and deceleration as well as rapidity. (3) Though touted as a testament to the vanguardism of the city, or as evidence confirming the glorified borderlessness of globalization, this exce ss of fastness points more to a certain lack than it does to the exhilaration normally associated with the image of the bustling metropolis. The excess of fastness seems chaotic, a result of the anxiety of the obsession that forever attempts to attain the unreachable. More tellingly, the excess of fastness points to the paradox of the obsession with mobility: that the excess degree to which mobility is pursued leads to a kind of intellectual or psychological paralysis. Rephrased, those who are obsessed become paralyzed for they cannot think of anything other than going from one point to another.

This, in turn, leads to a proliferation of losses, ranging from the loss of the ability to see past the immediate to the rejection of the idea of home. "The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place," wrote Michel de Certeau in The Practice of everyday life. (4) This observation was based on New York, a city comparable to Hong Kong in its portal nature, but in Hong Kong, de Certeau's observation is somewhat altered, for the idea of place simply has no relevance or consequence to begin with. In the never-ending process of moving from point A to B as quickly as possible, the city's inhabitants are exclusively committed to passing through the city. The city is made singular by the permanence of transience, even among those considered as "natives."

This single-minded obsession with mobility can be articulated in multiple ways and through multiple strategies, and the specificities embedded in a given temporality have much to do with these articulations. This is amply demonstrated in the videos produced during the critical years leading up to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China in which the city was to be united with a regime even more foreign than the British colonial presence. The absorption of Hong Kong into China was highly problematic, given that the space of Hong Kong had been detached from China for so long. (5) For some, there was the fear of erasure, and after the probability of the handover became a certainty in 1994, there was also the obsession with mobility that intensified during the few years just prior to the handover. The space of Hong Kong at this time, was, as Abbas has pointed out, "posited on the imminence of its disappearance." (6)