Speaker Gordon Mathews

Date 17.12.2015

Time 10:00

Location Exhibition Zone F, 1/F, CUHK School of Architecture

Chungking Mansions, a building in Tsim Sha Tsui, is perhaps the most globalized building in the world: I have counted 130 nationalities within its guesthouses. It is in effect an outpost of the developing world in downtown Hong Kong, and has long been seen as Hong Kong’s seedy and dangerous underside, and more recently, as a beacon of multiculturalism in Chinese Hong Kong. The building is replete with contradictions: it has the cheapest guesthouses and meals in Hong Kong, while being located on some of the most expensive real estate on earth; its design, imagined as luxurious in the 1960s, makes it perfect as a place to escape into and never be seen by police; and its tangled history, first as a backpacker mecca and then as a developing-world enclave have the potential to make it a tourist attraction, a development that would destroy the building in all its cheapness. In this talk, I discuss the architecture, history, and significance of Chungking Mansions, and its curious double role as Hong Kong’s shadowy background and international foreground.

Gordon Mathews has been teaching at CUHK for twenty years; he is Professor and Chair of the Dept. of Anthropology. He has written or edited books on topics ranging from what makes life worth living, to the global cultural supermarket, to the Japanese generation gap, to Hong Kong people’s learning to belong to a nation, to the cross-cultural pursuit of happiness, to Chungking Mansions, to the underground economy worldwide.

He is president of the Society for East Asian Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association. He has been teaching a class of asylum seekers in Chungking Mansions for the past ten years.