Hong Kong Corner Houses

Hong Kong Corner Houses
Author: Michael Wolf
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2010-12-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9888028723

What makes Michael Wolf stand above other photographers is his knack for capturing things that appear mundane and inconsequential within the chaos of the urban environment, and turning them into thought-provoking discoveries… Wolf makes us look at and appreciate the surprising multitude of delightful urban phenomena that we tend to overlook or under appreciate. By this means, he challenges the assumptions we have about the city we think we know. 吳爾夫 (Michael Wolf) 在攝影界中傲視同儕,是他能以卓越的攝影技巧,把煩囂都市生活中捕捉到平平無奇的小事,換化成令人細味的影像。我們自以為很了解這個城市,吳爾夫卻利用攝影,讓我們體會到這些被我們忽略了的有趣景象。 In Hong Kong Corner Houses, the internationally renowned German photographer Michael Wolf continues with his visual quest for the overlooked and underappreciated urban phenomena that give a city its special character. This time, he draws our attention to Hong Kong’s urban corners and buildings that are often inconspicuous amid the high-rise, high-density urban clutter of Hong Kong. These ordinary residential-commercial buildings of 1950s and 1960s vintage represent the expression of local Chinese pragmatism and expediency in the economic austerity of early postwar decades. The photographic presentation captures the inherent paradoxes of their architectural character: the quiet prominence, attractive banality, and tectonic chaos that give urban Hong Kong its endearing quality. Complementing the superb photographs of Michael Wolf, Hong Kong Corner Houses features an essay and extended captions by two of Hong Kong’s best-known academics in the field of architectural conservation, Drs. Lynne DiStefano and Lee Ho Yin. 在《街頭街尾》一書裏,國際聞名的德國攝影師 Michael Wolf再次運用敏銳的觀察力,尋覓一些常被忽略和忽視的香港城市現象,令讀者重新發現,隱藏在高樓林立的市區中別具風格的「街頭街尾」建築。 《街頭街尾》內所載的建築物,皆是五、六十年代的商住大廈。它們的出現,反映了香港華人在戰後的艱難條件下,如何運用務實的設計,應付迅速增長的屋宇需求。在這些其貌不揚、平平無奇和看似雜亂無章的建築物當中,Michael Wolf以卓越的攝影技巧,捕捉了它們生氣勃勃的一面,換化成令人細味的影像。這些充滿矛盾的特點正是香港引人入勝之處。 本書有幸邀請了香港大學著名的建築文物保護學者李浩然博士(Lee Ho Yin)和狄麗玲博士(Lynne DiStefano),為《街頭街尾》撰寫緒言及補充圖片說明。

Street Life Hong Kong

Street Life Hong Kong
Author: Nicole Chabot
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9789881613851

Hong Kong is famous for its vibrant, busy street scene. This book introduces us to two dozen people who provide its outdoor colour. Here you will meet a flower seller, a street musician and a tram driver; a bouncer, a shoe shiner and a gas canister delivery man; a security guard and a lifeguard; a man who makes a living climbing bamboo scaffolding, and a woman who ferries visitors around the harbour on a sampan. Among the interviewees are also mainlanders, and ethnic minorities including those from the Philippines, Africa and India, reflecting the diverse ethnic makeup of today's Hong Kong. These are the working people who are always seen but rarely heard, and in this book they tell their life stories in their own words. Sharp black-and-white portraits immerse the reader in the dynamic streetscape of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Informal Seating Arrangements

Hong Kong Informal Seating Arrangements
Author: Michael Wolf
Publisher:
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2014-10-26
Genre: Photography, Artistic
ISBN: 9783941825710

Sitting, people do already for a long time. Therefore chairs have been manufactured ever since. In Hong Kong many of them end up on the street. Plastic chairs, wicker chairs, armchairs, stools, bar stools, office chairs. Old and new, whole, broken, rebuilt and repaired. Together with alienated crates, cartons, wooden blocks and foam pillows they form curious roadside seating ensembles for the short relaxation or a little chat in between. 'Seating Arrangements' is the third of a total of 9 volumes in which Michael Wolf celebrates the diverse aspects of street life in Hong Kong and the improvisational skills of the urban residents.

Indelible City

Indelible City
Author: Louisa Lim
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593191838

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR An award-winning journalist and longtime Hong Konger indelibly captures the place, its people, and the untold history they are claiming, just as it is being erased. The story of Hong Kong has long been dominated by competing myths: to Britain, a “barren rock” with no appreciable history; to China, a part of Chinese soil from time immemorial, at last returned to the ancestral fold. For decades, Hong Kong’s history was simply not taught, especially to Hong Kongers, obscuring its origins as a place of refuge and rebellion. When protests erupted in 2019 and were met with escalating suppression from Beijing, Louisa Lim—raised in Hong Kong as a half-Chinese, half-English child, and now a reporter who has covered the region for nearly two decades—realized that she was uniquely positioned to unearth the city’s untold stories. Lim’s deeply researched and personal account casts startling new light on key moments: the British takeover in 1842, the negotiations over the 1997 return to China, and the future Beijing seeks to impose. Indelible City features guerrilla calligraphers, amateur historians and archaeologists, and others who, like Lim, aim to put Hong Kongers at the center of their own story. Wending through it all is the King of Kowloon, whose iconic street art both embodied and inspired the identity of Hong Kong—a site of disappearance and reappearance, power and powerlessness, loss and reclamation.

Asia Inside Out

Asia Inside Out
Author: Eric Tagliacozzo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674598504

(Continued). "Each author examines an unnoticed moment--a single year or decade--that redefined Asia in some important way. Heide Walcher explores the founding of the Safavid dynasty in the crucial battle of 1501, while Peter C. Perdue investigates New World silver's role in Sino-Portuguese and Sino-Mongolian relations after 1557. Victor Lieberman synthesizes imperial changes in Russia, Burma, Japan, and North India in the seventeenth century, Charles Wheeler focuses on Zen Buddhism in Vietnam to 1683, and Kerry Ward looks at trade in Pondicherry, India, in 1745. Nancy Um traces coffee exports from Yemen in 1636 and 1726, and Robert Hellyer follows tea exports from Japan to global markets in 1874. Anand Yang analyzes the diary of an Indian soldier who fought in China in 1900, and Eric Tagliacozzo portrays the fragility of Dutch colonialism in 1910. Andrew Willford delineates the erosion of cosmopolitan Bangalore in the mid-twentieth century, and Naomi Hosoda relates the problems faced by Filipino workers in Dubai in the twenty-first.

Interstitial Hong Kong

Interstitial Hong Kong
Author: Xiaoxuan Lu
Publisher: Jovis Verlag
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9783868596892

Enmeshed in Hong Kong's densely woven urban fabric, wedged between its towering mixed-use complexes and perched along its steep hillsides, sits a network of more than 500 miniature public parks comprising the smallest unit of the city's public open space network. Though plentiful, these so-called Sitting-out Areas - referred to locally as 三角屎坑 (literally: a "three-cornered shit pit") - have never been considered in terms of the collective resource they have the potential to be. This book presents a series of critical essays revealing the city's Sitting-out Areas in relation to Hong Kong's planning histories and shifting terrains, while also tracking how these spatial fragments have been shaped by concepts of publicness, accessibility and regulation. The second half of the book presents 44 richly illustrated case studies revealing the variety and idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong's smallest open spaces. Ultimately, the book argues that we can understand the high-density city not only through its buildings, but through the character and potency of its interstitial landscapes.

Asia Inside Out

Asia Inside Out
Author: Eric Tagliacozzo
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674987632

A pioneering study of historical developments that have shaped Asia concludes with this volume tracing the impact of ideas and cultures of people on the move across the continent, whether willingly or not. In the final volume of Asia Inside Out, a stellar interdisciplinary team of scholars considers the migration of people—and the ideas, practices, and things they brought with them—to show the ways in which itinerant groups have transformed their culture and surroundings. Going beyond time and place, which animated the first two books, this third one looks at human beings on the move. Human movement from place to place across time reinforces older connections while forging new ones. Erik Harms turns to Vietnam to show that the notion of a homeland as a marked geographic space can remain important even if that space is not fixed in people’s lived experience. Angela Leung traces how much of East Asia was brought into a single medical sphere by traveling practitioners. Seema Alavi shows that the British preoccupation with the 1857 Indian Revolt allowed traders to turn the Omani capital into a thriving arms emporium. James Pickett exposes the darker side of mobility in a netherworld of refugees, political prisoners, and hostages circulating from the southern Russian Empire to the Indian subcontinent. Other authors trace the impact of movement on religious art, ethnic foods, and sports spectacles. By stepping outside familiar categories and standard narratives, this remarkable series challenges us to rethink our conception of Asia in complex and nuanced ways.

A Photographer in Old Peking

A Photographer in Old Peking
Author: Hedda Morrison
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1985
Genre: History
ISBN:

Peking is one of the great cities of the world and one of the most fascinating. It has changed so radically in the past thirty years that the city's fabulous past is in danger of being lost to memory. This memoir of Peking from 1933 to 1946, compiled by one of the finest photographers who has ever worked in Asia, is thus a significant document and will be of interest not only to longstanding China-watchers but also to the many tourists who have been privileged to visit Peking in the decade since the city has again been opened to the West. The photographs provide a unique insight into life in Peking in the years preceeding the Communist revolution of 1949. The photographer, Hedda Morrison, left Nazi Germany in 1933 to manage a German-owned photographic studio in Peking. Her sympathetic approach to her subject is manifested in the large number of photographs showing Chinese people from all walks of life at work and enjoying their leisure. Architectural studies provide valuable evidence of buildings and monuments that have since changed or disappeared, and photographs taken beyond Peking and in the Western Hills convey the beauty of the north China landscape.

Hong Kong Trilogy

Hong Kong Trilogy
Author: Michael Wolf
Publisher:
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2014
Genre: Hong Kong (China)
ISBN: 9783941825598

Michael Wolf’s adopted home of Hong Kong is rife with subject matter. Within this bustling metropolis, there is always more for the German photographer to discover, especially in the often overlooked details at or just above eye level. In this photo series, Wolf carefully filters out the urban noise to focus on those things left behind – whether intentionally or not. Dozens of mops and gloves positioned to dry form a strange parade, while colourful articles of clothing, perhaps blown off balconies and clotheslines, dangle from wires, pipes and neon signs, stranded in an in-between space, part of the city yet removed from it. Brilliantly framed, the images represent frozen moments and histories.0.