Abstract
Throughout its history, Hong Kong’s identity has been marginalized within the China-centered cultural order, due to geographical location as well as cultural and linguistic factors. This chapter uses a case study of graphic design to illustrate the negotiation of this identity. The grand narrative of design in China frequently overlooks important and groundbreaking contributions originating in Hong Kong, beginning in the late nineteenth century, which will be detailed in this chapter. It also traces how, following the first wave of post-war local consciousness in Hong Kong, graphic designers maneuvered the binary “East meets West” concept into a key component of Hong Kong’s cultural identity from the 1960s to the 1990s. More recently the post-1980s and 1990s generation has renegotiated and redefined the landscape of graphic design. The conclusion suggests the culturally symbolic possibilities implicit in resurrecting a local myth: the half-man, half-fish merman Lo Ting (盧亭).
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Wong, W.S. (2018). Negotiating the Marginalized Identity of Hong Kong: A Case in Graphic Design. In: The Disappearance of Hong Kong in Comics, Advertising and Graphic Design. East Asian Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92096-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92096-2_8
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