Street Meditations: On Poetry, Street Photography and Everyday Life in Hong Kong

Authors

  • Eddie Tay, Chinese University of Hong Kong

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v6i2.257

Abstract

This paper is part of an ongoing auto-ethnographic project to do with writing poetry and taking photographs in Hong Kong. As a poet who is interested in the aesthetic potential of visual images, I am intrigued by what Michel de Certeau calls the “absent figure,†a figure often obscured by techniques and rationalities that govern the everyday life of the urban city that is Hong Kong (vi). If art is about the salvaging of meaning, then it is in league with everyday life, to the extent that artistic works become transgressive and predatory mediums. Poems and photographs are regarded here as forms that usurp the material spaces of Hong Kong. In this way, one is led to consider the possibilities of cultural production as a kind of furtive production wherein the everyday life of Hong Kong is made to speak.

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Author Biography

Eddie Tay, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Eddie Tay teaches creative writing and poetry at the Department of English, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research is in the area of creative writing as well as anglophone literatures of Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. He is the author of 3 poetry collections, the most recent being The Mental Life of Cities (Chameleon Press, 2010), which was awarded the 2012 Singapore Literature Prize (English Category). He is also the author of a monograph entitled Colony, Nation, and Globalisation: Not at Home in Singaporean and Malaysian Literature (HKU Press; NUS Press, 2011).  

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Published

2012-12-15

How to Cite

Tay, Chinese University of Hong Kong, E. (2012). Street Meditations: On Poetry, Street Photography and Everyday Life in Hong Kong. Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature, 6(2), 31–44. https://doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v6i2.257

Issue

Section

Articles on Asia Pacific Poetry