HONG KONG POP

This thesis is dedicated to the city of Hong Kong, where 7.35 million people share a similar pattern of living in their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in this hyper-dense metropolis.

by Anselm Cheung Yin Ngai

The prequel
Paris 1875. Constantin Guys sketched handsome dandies wandering in the arcade. Charles Baudelaire recorded the internal psychology and external appearance of the Flaneur. The above were picked up by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades Project.

Zeitgeist of HK Gen Z
Hong Kong 2016. Zoe takes a photo of her outfit of the day (#ootd)using her iPhone, against the backdrop of Causeway Bay, which is the most fashionable neighborhood in the city. She proceeds to upload the photo to her Instagram, where her 128,000 followers immediately learn of her outfit, and the urban environment of Hong Kong.

Methodology
By inspecting Hong Kong pop culture, this thesis aims to map the psychology of Hong Kong people, ultimately reconstruct the material and cultural condition of Hong Kong.

Fig.1 Snapshot of the City

Fig.1 Picture on the left:  Gustave Caillebotte, Le pont de l’Europe. 1876, Oil on canvas, 124.7 × 180.6 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Genève. From: Wikimedia, http://wikimedia.org (Access: 23 September, 2016)

Picture on the right: zosuen, Causeway Bay with @oh.leemon, 2016, Instagram, 1080px x 1080px. Instagram. From Instagram (Accessed: 23 September, 2016)

Fig.2 Shopping is the Premise

Fig.2 Picture on the left: Roger Viollet, Passage Choiseul. Around 1910, Photography. 3504 x 2084 px. From: Getty Images, www.gettyimages.com (Accessed: 23 September ,2016)

Picture on the right: by author.

Bibliography
Walter Benjamin, The arcades project (Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Belknap Press, 1999)
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 2007)
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and other essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1995)
Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, Sze Tsung Leong, Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen GmbH, 2001)

Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life in The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1976)