Portal Confluence - Harbour in-fluence

From identity-making through the ‘discontinent’ of migration and diaspora, concessionary negotiation that invert the relation to land and property between the foreign and the local, to the gathering and distributing pulses of therapeutic spaces analogous to harbours and lighthouses, this opening session sets out to trace the in-fluence of and between port cities. These are harbours that harbour the temporal passage of the émigré, borrowing the protagonists in W. G. Sebald’s ficto-historical tales, who moves, makes and carries their places along, transitioning from dis-place to re-place, embracing the state of fluency and transactionary propensity. The protagonists of this session, not the familiar local dwellers nor stable settlers, but those who speak different tongues (cultures) while sharing the same vessel (experience of migration), have left their marks of in-fluence upon the portal urbanity connected through the maritime trade networks. The sense of place in these harbours is never simple; they are emigrants in themselves, just like the vessels they receive and send off, un/up/load and repair, make and mix, without the pretext of permanence, security nor integration. Between the conditions of greatest constraint and greatest expanse, between the exigence and sorrow of the exile and the return, harbours are the places of the gathering and dispersion of partial spatial fragments and inhabitations that evidence both the voyage and the voyagers as space-maker that shaped the harbours’ ‘con-fluential’ spatial parlance and contingent urbanity.

Watch online here.

Schedule

2:00pm - Introduction: Doreen Bernath and Ke Bo Izac Tsai

2:15pm - Huei-Ying Kuo: Beyond Chinese Diaspora - Rethinking Asia in the ‘European Age of Empire’ from an Archipelago Perspective

3:15pm break

3:30pm - Shiyu Jin: Shaping Modern Shanghai - Built Environment Transformation and Colonial Peculiarity

4:00pm - James Kwang Ho Chung: Crisis and Therapy - The Architecture of the Lighthouse Effect in the Midst of Darkness

4:30pm - Discussion with presenters and guest discussants Sean Gwee, Chia-Yu Liang and Stuart Thompson

Harbour in-fluence is the first of the three seminar sessions on the theme of Portal Confluence, which is the third episode of the PhD seminar series Interjectures 2022-23. The ‘Portal Confluence’ episode will be co-convened by Doreen Bernath, Ke Bo Izac Tsai and Shiyu Jin. Each session engages presentations by guest speakers, followed by comments and discussions, and is open to participants from the PhD and graduate school programmes, as well as open to the larger AA school and community.

Guest discussants:

Sean Gwee is an Installation Artist, Art Fabricator and Architectural Designer. He graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture and is the recipient of the Mark Fisher Scholarship for the intersection of architecture, performance, media and engineering. He currently runs The Made Agency, an art and design fabrication space (asset-based community platform), and Quite-ok Things, an outlet for design covering anything from renovation-restorations, industrial design to performance production. He recently produced a collaborative show with musician and composer Kin Leonn called on earth as it is in water a meditation on the ambiguity between land and sea. This was a follow up to a love letter to the lighthouse in the expanded field his thesis production/ prop-based performance piece performed at the AA in 2020.

Stuart Thompson lectured in Chinese Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is affiliated to the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies and LSE Taiwan Research Centre, for which he continues to act regularly as Chair and Discussant for seminars and conferences. His research traverse contexts of Taiwan, Southern China, and Ireland on topics of food and culture, anthropology of education, death rites, cultural literacy, schooling, language, history and ritual, trauma, memories and identities, insular cinemas and literary metaphors. His publications include co-editing and contributing to: Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson & Jakob Klein (eds.) Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China, (Routledge, 2016); and Fang-Long Shih, Stuart Thompson & Paul-Francois Tremlett (eds.) 2009 Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan, Routledge.

Chia-Yu Liang is a Doctoral student in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex, where he is currently conducting his doctoral research on ‘The Politics of the Return of Tianxia in Modern China’. He has published in the journal Political Theology and the British Journal of Chinese Studies. Beyond academia, he has participated in the movement of ‘Public Understanding of Philosophy’ in Taiwan, and translated several books on Political Philosophy, including the first translation of Simone Weil’s work in Taiwan.

Huei-Ying Kuo

Beyond Chinese Diaspora - Rethinking Asia in the ‘European Age of Empire’ from an Archipelago Perspective

This paper adapts the Francophone scholar Francois Noudelmann’s concept of ‘discontinent’ (territorial discontinuity of archipelagos) to explore the potentials and limitations of examining the Chinese identity-makings beyond the framework of Chinese nationalism in maritime Asia in the 1920s. My case is the port cities with significant Chinese migrant communities, including British Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japanese Taiwan. I employ the primary sources such as the Hong Kong-based literati Lau Chu-Pak 劉鑄伯 and Tan Liyuan’s 譚荔垣 Shehui zhuyi ping yi (commentaries of socialism) (1919) and the Singapore-born Anglophone scholar Song Ong Siang’s 宋旺相 (1871-1941) One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (1923), and the Taiwanese Lin Hsien-tang’s 林獻堂 (1881-1956) diary entries in the 1920s. The goal is to provide an alternative view of the capitalist impact in Asia from the bourgeois and learned communities in port cities.

Huei-Ying Kuo is Associate Research Professor at the Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University. She has published research articles in the broad fields of identity makings, nationalism, and empires in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as the monograph, Networks beyond Empires: Chinese Business and Nationalism in the Hong Kong-Singapore Corridor. Having obtained BA and MA in Sociology from National Taiwan University, she was an assistant professor of Asian history (tenure track) and director of East Asian Studies minor at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The research awards that she has received include the Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship in 2012, the above program’s New Paradigms Grant in 2019, William Dearborn Fellowship for American History at Houghton Library, Harvard University in 2017, Outstanding Paper Award for Hong Kong studies Annual Conference in 2019, and The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute 2021-2022 Faculty Grants program at Johns Hopkins University. She held visiting positions at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Hong Kong, and Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.

Shiyu Jin

Shaping Modern Shanghai - Built Environment Transformation and Colonial Peculiarity

After the opening for foreign trade in 1843, Modern Shanghai rapidly became metropolitan in the far east in one hundred years with the influx and communication of different foreign cultures and identities. During the colonial period, Shanghai developed various eclectic public buildings and formed its most distinctive housing type – Lilong, giving rise to a unique urban fabric. Such rapid urban development was facilitated by a comprehensive shift in the built environment and propelled by the peculiarity of colonization in Shanghai. Trading in the foreign Settlement of Shanghai introduced architectures of various new functions to embrace a rising modern life and more advanced building structures and materials for urban constructions. In addition, new financial institutions and the formation of professional architects contributed to a new modus operandi of architecture. The colonial form is another latent and crucial factor in shaping modern Shanghai. As the foundation for the foreign Settlement negotiated by foreigners and Shanghai local governments, the Land Regulations regulated a private-to-private land lease between Chinese and foreigners without state involvement in a specific area demarcated to accommodate foreigners. Two crucial changes later broke the pure accommodation purpose of the foreign Settlement. Not approved by the Chinese government, the foreign merchants in Shanghai established their administrative bodies to manage the foreign Settlements and gradually usurped various powers of the Chinese government upon the Chinese in the Settlements. A policy shift from segregation to mixed living between foreigners and the Chinese within foreign Settlements in response to the influx of the Chinese population legalized real estate development for foreigners to make economic interest from the large Chinese population. In such a colonial peculiarity, a new housing type Lilong came into being, which involved various subjects of different identities as the most common housing and comprised a large part of the history of modern Shanghai.

Shiyu Jin is a PhD candidate and a seminar tutor of History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He obtained a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design in 2020 from the AAP (Architecture, Art, Planning), Cornell University. Prior to that, he received a Bachelor of Architecture in 2018 from Tongji University, Shanghai, and studied at the Technical University of Munich in an exchange programme in 2017. During his undergraduate education, he took part in the National Undergraduate Innovation Programme and did collaborative research in the new workers’ village of Shanghai (2015-17). Shiyu’s research interest lies in domestic space, type and typology, and colonial architecture and urban transformation. His PhD research reflects on the concept of type and typology from a postcolonial perspective by exploring a representative housing Lilong in Shanghai during China’s semi-colonial history.

James Kwang Ho Chung

Crisis and Therapy – The Architecture of the Lighthouse Effect in the Midst of Darkness

The ‘lighthouse effect’ is a concept that has been in scholarship used to imply certain spatial forms of both gathering (beacon, orientating, harbouring) and distributing (voyage, departure-arrival, distant connection), as well as serving as multiple nodes of signalling and protection in exceptional times of transits, threats and crisis. In this presentation, I will talk about three work-in-progress projects: 'Crisis & Therapy' exposes the contemporary uprootedness and architecture as an array of sites which attempt to streamline society to dissolve contradiction and erase the previous order; '(Un)Faithful Seouls' for Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 proposes a manual for architectural mutations in Korea by exposing various experiments of contemporary lives that are already underway; and 'Medicinal Architecture' attempt to capture the latest medical typologies of Seoul that claim to heal and to analyse their agency, intents, techniques and therapeutic properties of the architecture and practice. The architecture of the lighthouse effect may provide guides for travellers to construct their own journey in the midst of darkness and chaos.

James Kwang-Ho Chung is a Unit Master at the Architectural Association, an associate lecturer at the RCA and leads the AA Visiting School Seoul. He is interested in understanding contemporary Korean typologies as spatial apparatus. His most recent research focuses on identifying paradigmatic practices and disciplinary reactions to medical transformations responding to situations of crisis in South Korea. He has realised many built projects, with strong working experience at numerous studios, including Hopkins Architects, Grimshaw Architects and Foster + Partners. He has given lectures at various academic institutions in Korea and the UK.