Arnika Fuhrmann (Cornell University)

What does it mean to imagine “Asia” beyond the reductive visions of contemporary policy? This project explores the contemporary visual culture of Chinese pasts and colonial modernities, revived across the cinemas, new media, hospitality venues, and other material sites of East and Southeast Asia. Examining the doubling of Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Shanghai across these sites, it investigates how a transregional Chinese modernity that emerged under, but always exceeded, conditions of colonial and national governance informs the present. As film directors such as Wong Kar-wai and hotels, bars, and clubs revive 1930s Shanghai and 1960s Hong Kong modernities—and exploit the Chinese past of Bangkok’s old European trading quarters—this redeployment of (semi-)colonial histories and Chinese urban pasts is emerging as a primary signifier of the good life and understandings of Asia in the present. The deployment of this twentieth century translocal Chinese modernity points to enduring regional imaginaries that diverge from global notions of “China Rising,” the People’s Republic’s own Belt and Road Initiative, or the policies of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations. Bangkok—as a Chinese city—stands at the center of these prominent, transregional revivals in which media and urban design projects speak of radically different desires than those of current policy.