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Hong Kong Plays Itself

[84]Dennis Zhou Over the past decade, the filmmaker Chan Hau Chun has kept seeking new ways to capture how Hong Kong’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy.

August 23, 2025

Chan Hau Chun/Empty Gallery

A scene from Chan Hau Chun’s Map of Traces, 2025

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The cityscape of Hong Kong, which grew over the course of two centuries from a fishing village to a colonial port to a gleaming metropolis and international financial center, has long proven hard to visualize. In his classic 1997 study Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, published just months before the region’s handover from Britain to China, the former University of Hong Kong professor Ackbar Abbas suggested that part of the problem lay in the area’s perpetual status as “not so much a space as a place of transit.”

Before 1842, when the Qing Dynasty ceded the island to the British Empire at the end of the First Opium War, the area’s population was about seven and a half thousand people. Over the succeeding decades, as the British leased first the neighboring Kowloon Peninsula and then the outlying New Territories, the expanding colony became less a destination in and of itself than a point to facilitate trade, first between China and the rest of the world and subsequently among the many banks, shipping conglomerates, import-export companies, and other entities that set up shop in the free port. As old-fashioned, extractive imperialism morphed into more nebulous forms of global exchange, Hong Kong became a testing ground for an emergent brand of laissez-faire capitalism, implemented by the British authorities and promulgated as “positive non-interventionism.” By 1980 Milton Friedman could declare of Hong Kong, “If you want to see how the free market really works, this is the place to come.”

The city’s skyline has always been unstable and indeterminate. The lead-up to the new millennium saw a spree of property speculation. Developers demolished still-recent constructions and rebuilt them according to changing priorities and incentives, even as waves of refugees and migrants—driven by famines, conflict, or economic opportunity—needed housing, however haphazardly assembled. Hong Kong’s architecture has long combined cultural hybridity and temporal confusion, with traditional bamboo scaffolding adorning the sides of buildings designed by Norman Foster and other international starchitects.

The territory’s politics have in recent decades hardly been more secure. The 1997 handover set a timeline that kept the city in a state of suspension: under the “one country, two systems” model, for fifty years, until 2047, residents of Hong Kong are supposed to retain the personal and economic liberties they had received as British subjects. That sense of flux has in some respects grown more acute since 2019, when protests swept the city in reaction to a proposed law, later withdrawn, that would have allowed the extradition of suspected criminals from Hong Kong to the mainland.

Generations of Hong Kong filmmakers have worked to find a cinematic language that could capture an environment so marked by contingency and ephemerality. In recent years, one particularly original and sustained such effort has come from Chan Hau Chun, who has made several works blurring the boundaries between documentary and video art, and whose newest film debuted at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery this summer. An epistolary reflection on the city, partly addressed to a then-imprisoned friend, Map of Traces (2025) unearths fragments of Hong Kong’s collective history and forms them into an image of its present. “Memory,” she writes in one letter displayed over a black background, “is like a hidden shape, waiting for the right moment to resurface.”

For many people the most recognizable images of Hong Kong still come from the 1980s and 1990s, when a wave of iconoclastic filmmakers—Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark—and martial arts stars like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee started making hyperstylized commercial features. Often starring Cantopop idols, these films tended to have pulpy plots that followed recognizable but exaggerated genre conventions, all filtered through antic, almost music video–like aesthetics. Frequently they lavished attention on the landscape of Hong Kong and paid close attention to the proximity of the licit and the illicit.

Album/Alamy Stock Photo

Tony Leung as Cop 663 and Faye Wong as Faye in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, 1994

In Wong’s Chungking Express (1994), for example, shot in twenty-three days on location in the Chungking Mansions housing development of Tsim Sha Tsui district and other local landmarks, one fast food joint provides the backdrop for chance encounters between police officers, gangsters, smugglers, drug mules, flight attendants, immigrants, expatriates, and the city’s many other denizens. The film’s form encapsulated Hong Kong as much as its content did. By slowing down the frame rate and step-printing (duplicating frames to create a laggy effect), Wong and his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, created a visual style—part slow-motion blurring, part jerky queasiness—that replicated the experience of the city’s hyperactivity.

In his book, Abbas argues that domestic audiences came to desire a more specific form of Hong Kong culture at the same moment that the city’s relative independence felt threatened, creating an identity rooted in the potential for its own disappearance. It was during this period between Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 visit to Hong Kong, which led to the signing of the Sino–British Joint Declaration in 1984, and the official handover in 1997 that a recognizably Hong Kong aesthetic cohered: intensely commercial yet idiosyncratic, filled with pop optimism yet grounded in diverse traditions. Genres like the romance, the wuxia, the gangster film, and the police procedural were ready foundations from which to develop that aesthetic: filmmakers could draw on both received and local frameworks to create a vernacular that felt representative of a city caught between worlds. Shootouts could be modeled after Peking Opera choreography; martial-arts stars could confront neocolonial overlords.

After 1997, however, a darker mood set in, apparent in films like Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong, the first independent feature to be released after the handover. Made on leftover film stock, Chan’s feature addressed similar subjects as, say, Chungking Express in a more pessimistic, unvarnished vein, following alienated youth through the city’s gang-infested public housing estates. A similar cynicism runs through Johnnie To’s Election films, in which a triad’s political system mirrors that of contemporary Hong Kong, and Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs trilogy (the basis for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed), in which an undercover police officer and a mole from the triads embedded in the police department have corresponding identity crises as they try to ferret each other out.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century Hong Kong filmmakers found themselves in a changed practical environment, with new incentives. After the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement in 2003, coproductions between Hong Kong and mainland China became more viable. Many directors moved either to Hollywood or the mainland, or both. After directing American blockbusters like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2, John Woo helmed Red Cliff, a mainland action film inspired by episodes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms; Wong’s most recent project was his first television series, Blossoms Shanghai, an adaptation of the 2014 Chinese novel Blossoms, by Jin Yucheng, and a coproduction with China Central Television and the Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent’s streaming service. The show, which came out in China in 2023, captures the frenetic reopening of the stock market in 1990s Shanghai, the city of Wong’s birth. In Hong Kong the exodus of these auteurs—combined with commercial pressures and political stasis—drew local productions back to a safer mean, before the political crises of the next decade further restricted their room to maneuver.

What paths forward remain, then, for filmmakers living and working in Hong Kong today? By approaching Hong Kong and its freighted identities from a different angle, eschewing the monumentality and genre conventions of her predecessors in favor of a more intimate, essayistic, and personal style, Chan Hau Chun offers one perspective on how the territory appears to its residents now.

Chan Hau Chun/Empty Gallery

A scene from Chan Hau Chun’s 32+4, 2015

Like many in Hong Kong, she began her life elsewhere. Chan was born in a small village in Chaozhou in 1989, the second child of an arranged marriage between a father who had been working in Hong Kong as an undocumented laborer and a mother twenty years his junior. Partly because she was an unsanctioned additional child under the One Child Policy, after her father returned to Hong Kong she had to live with relatives, neighbors, and foster families in different cities. She joined her father at twelve, along with her mother and siblings, when he raised enough money to get them all permits. Growing up in the city’s public housing estates, she picked up photography as a teenager as a way to spend more time away from a difficult home environment, before studying film production at the City University of Hong Kong.

Her thesis project, 32+4 (2015), already shows a striking awareness of how Hong Kong’s cramped infrastructure both shapes its residents’ domestic lives and reflects the fraught trajectories that brought so many of them to the city in the first place. The opening shot is of an ordinary street seen through a window, before the film cuts to show Chan, perched on her bed, blocking out the light with black construction paper. In diaristic narration—conveyed only through onscreen text—Chan discusses how she came to live in this space, one of the many subdivided flats (lofts partitioned into multiple tiny units) that provide the remnants of affordable housing in the city. Her mother, she explains, left her father and married her stepfather soon after arriving in Hong Kong—but they all still live in the same housing estate, where they share an elevator bank. A blurry still shows a moment when Chan recorded her father and stepfather passing each other, possibly unbeknownst to either of them; throughout the film Chan tries to interview her mother only for the older woman to defensively evade her questions about the past.

As Chan films herself—editing the footage that would make it into 32+4, going through old photographs doctored to remove Chan’s father, or discussing her ambivalence about recording her parents—she tries to piece together her family’s unspoken history by other means. In one scene she films a dented door. It got that way, she explains, when her father attacked her mother with a meat cleaver. To remove it from view, her stepfather took it down from the living room, turned it around, and installed it in her room, where she had to see it every day. After sketching an image of a woman onto the dented wood, she covers up parts of it with photographs from years earlier showing her mother in the midst of a nervous breakdown—huddled naked in the shower or looking defensively into the camera—occasionally cropped to leave the top of her head or the bottoms of her feet unseen. The edges of Chan’s drawing fill in the missing parts of her shorn images, as if completing them.

Chan Hau Chun/Empty Gallery

Chan Hau Chun and her father in 32+4, 2015

Unlike Hong Kong New Wave auteurs, who mostly focused on public spaces, sites of commerce, or governmental offices, Chan lingers throughout her work on these sorts of claustrophobic domestic interiors. In 32+4 her handheld camera almost never ventures outside, except for a brief trip with her father to his ancestral village. There he finally unburdens himself, admitting that he doesn’t know whether he should die in Hong Kong or on the mainland, discussing his years of hard labor, and opening up about his feelings of betrayal over his divorce. Finally he asks Chan to pass judgment on whether he or her mother are to blame. “Why bother asking if it’s not about right or wrong?” he says. “What’s the interview about?”

Chan’s next projects expanded from her immediate family to the city at large, focusing on people that earlier portrayals of the city tended to exclude. Searching Lau (2019) and Call Me Mrs. Chan (2017) profile a street artist and a custodian in an office tower, respectively, as one roams the city and the other takes out endless bags of trash. No Song to Sing (2017) juxtaposes scenes of mundane, urban ennui with sexual fantasies and dream sequences in a vein that recalls the work of the Taiwan-based Malaysian-Chinese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang, cutting from a scene of a man foraging for parts on a street to another man forlornly waiting in a sex parlor or being whipped by a dominatrix, or a young sex worker scrolling her phone in a replica subway car.

A room of many rooms (2024), edited from footage that Chan started amassing in 2019, centers on residents of a subdivided flat whom Chan befriended. We see them lying in bed, smoking, watching television, playing on their phones, discussing their daily routines or the swallows that have made a nest inside their building, in a series of mostly stationary shots that both convey each person’s confinement and attend patiently to how they curate their limited space. One can see the influence of figures like Tsai, the Chinese documentarian Wang Bing, and the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, not just in their attention to how the surreal and the fantastical leak out of the everyday but also in their comfort with formats that prioritize immediacy and intimacy. Like them, too, Chan has a certain skepticism about what aspects of life a camera can fully capture, even as she tries to document the social reality around her.

Chan Hau Chun/Empty Gallery

A scene from Chan Hau Chun’s A room of many rooms, 2024

Her latest work, Map of Traces, further develops her diarist’s-eye-view of Hong Kong. (I was invited to view the work in Hong Kong by Empty Gallery.) It opens on what looks like a still image of figures in a park, their faces curiously blurred. After a few moments the camera zooms, pans, and then starts moving down the park lane in a distinctively jerky manner that gives the game away: we’re watching footage taken from Google Maps, passed through a grainy black-and-white filter. Soon Chan and a friend in London start narrating their “walk” as a cursor blinks on and off. They put the map’s function to endearingly impractical ends, tilting the vantage up to see the foliage of a banyan tree during a conversation about why such trees can’t take root in the harsh climes of England. Nostalgia is mediated through surveillance technology: as the pair discuss old pop songs and folk sayings and stroll down Nathan Road (named after Hong Kong’s thirteenth colonial governor) and past Prince Edward Station, it becomes clear that Chan’s friend lives in exile and may never return to Hong Kong. “I just don’t know how to make sense of what’s going on in this world,” she says. “I’m desperate to find meaning in all of this.”

The film takes its structure from letters that Chan wrote to another friend, C.R., while he was confined to a detention facility for his role in the 2019 protests. The text, which flashes silently onscreen at intervals, mixes poetic musings with practical affairs. Chan responds to C.R.’s updates about learning guitar in his cell; she shares footage of herself exploring the hill behind his facility and a cell phone video of two people holding hands across the aisle of a train carriage.

Also interspersed throughout are fragments of footage that Chan shot of the 2019 protests. A scene of a musical action—protesters playing trombones and clarinets in a park—plays without volume, except for the isolated, plaintive sound of a woman blowing on a blade of grass; fuzzy images depict what might be figures tending to a hedge, until we realize that they are stripping protest flyers from its branches. The result is not so much elegiac as defiantly evasive. One man, the protagonist from Searching Lau, describes getting arrested after surveillance cameras captured him writing a character associated with the protests on a city wall. Now he uses water, which the cameras can’t pick up, to tag buildings around Hong Kong with his seemingly innocuous drawings: a smiling sunflower, spindly-rayed suns, goofy cat-like creatures.

Chan Hau Chun/Empty Gallery

A scene from Chan Hau Chun’s Map of Traces, 2025

“Lately I’ve wandered through many places in my dreams,” Chan writes to C.R. in one of her letters. “Sometimes I catch glimpses of you there, but more often, it’s just empty landscapes. Like a city that both exists and doesn’t exist, hovering between presence and absence.” Map of Traces seems interested less in ascribing a single identity to Hong Kong than in capturing how the city’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy themselves, their own ways of representing the space and their relationship to it—precisely what often gets squeezed out of the discourse about its future. In this sense Chan’s films present one way to finally see Hong Kong the way it sees itself. In the beginning of Map of Traces, as she and her friend traverse the city through Google Maps, the images start blurring together, racing through crowds with anonymized faces and past street signs, storefronts, and almost abstract scenery in a way that seems to reflect an uncontainable sense of time flying by, before the film settles on one detail: a pedestrian traffic signal covered with a trash bag, broken during the protests and then removed from sight.

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Chun has kept seeking new ways to capture how Hong Kong’s residents navigate its ambiguity and indeterminacy. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/08/23/hong-kong-plays-itself/?utm_source=nybooks&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share 90. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/08/23/hong-kong-plays-itself/?printpage=true 91. mailto:letters@nybooks.com 92. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/05/13/the-quantum-generation-jia-zhangke/ 93. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/03/07/filming-and-forgetting-taipei-edward-yang/ 94. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2022/06/03/poet-of-the-camera/ 95. https://emptygallery.com/exhibitions/eg35-chan-hau-chun-2/ 96. https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/08/23/hong-kong-plays-itself/ 97. https://twitter.com/share?text=Hong Kong Plays Itself&url=https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/08/23/hong-kong-plays-itself/&via=nybooks 98. 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