The Beijing Palace Museum Comes to Hong Kong: Aestheticizing the Future of the Nation

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Speaker: Dr. Carolyn Carter, University of Technology Sydney

Abstract:

Cities in China provide “cultural facilities”—libraries, museums, concert halls—for the people that present state approved displays of culture and information based on Soviet-derived socialist total planning. Amidst tensions in the Hong Kong-mainland China relationship, this paper examines the Hong Kong Palace Museum project, a treasure box for newly mobile national relics from the Beijing Palace Museum, and its regional context. Based on over two decades of periodic fieldwork in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, the interdisciplinary analysis examines continuities within socialism’s control of cultural content through aestheticization of the idealized future of greater integration.

Biography:

Carolyn Cartier is Professor of Human Geography and China Studies and chair of the Global Studies undergraduate degree at the University of Technology Sydney. She is a Founding Fellow of the Centre for China in the World at the Australian National University and a past Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong. Her work on cities in China draws from spatial thought to examine state territorial practices in the urban process. Her most recent writing on Hong Kong, “Among Greater Issues of the Day: Hong Kong in China, 2003-13,” appears in Critical Inquiry.