Hong Kong in transition and “aesthetic anxiety” in the millennium films of Wong Kar-Wai by Eriko Ong and David Christopher, p. 1

Hong Kong in transition and “aesthetic anxiety” in the
millennium films of Wong Kar-Wai

In three of his end-of-millenium films—Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), and In the Mood for Love (2000—celebrated Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai depicts anxieties pertaining to Hong Kong’s transient identity during the massive political upheaval that was to occur in 1997 when Hong Kong was delivered from over one hundred and fifty years of British colonial regulation to officially become an administrative region of China. Although Wong has directed a total of ten films at the time of writing, we focus on these three films in particular due to their comparative popularity and their significant release dates that frame the 1997 hand-over.[1] [open endnotes in new window]


A scene from In the Mood for Love. The slow rising of the cigarette smoke, illuminated by subdued lighting, creates a striking visual. This elusive feeling that Wong captures is further characterized by still camera framing and slow, melancholic music.	Wong's iconic use of step-printing technique in Chungking Express.

While scholars have theorized the films’ aesthetics, the provenance of their unique treatment of the handover has remained vague or absent. With the benefit of hindsight informed by more recent political developments, such as Donald Trump’s hostility to China,[1b] we wish here to specifically articulate the unique aesthetic innovations that Wong employs and develops in terms of the socio-political and ideological milieu that engendered them.

Wong makes a social commentary on Hong Kong’s historical situation and its social consequences through a highly innovative use of the elements of filmmaking, ranging from the films’ narratives to their cinematic techniques and visual symbolism. Indeed, Wong’s films betray an anxiety surrounding the 1997 handover buried in their elusive aesthetics, an anxiety that Wong explores on a sensual level rather than through an explicitly political script. In this regard, we build on Gary Bettinson’s notion of the “sensual aesthetics” as they occur in Wong’s films and the political meanings they engender through the affordances of Wong’s innovative filmmaking techniques.[2] From this point of departure we develop the notion of a sensual aesthetic anxiety that Wong generates to stage and thematize the social concerns that emerged as a result of the impending or recently realized 1997 political hand-over of Hong and the ostensible 50-year period of capitalist liminality that was promised to follow it.[3]


Time is a significant recurring theme in Wong’s second new wave films.

According to Ackbar Abbas, an authority on Wong’s films,

“In the films made up to 1997, we might think of disappearance as an allusion to the Hong Kong handover. What was once there—a benign colonialism under which the city had thrived—would soon be no more.”[4]

Indeed, Hong Kong’s identity can be understood as temporary and impermanent[5] or “transient” in the context of the 1997 handover around which Wong’s most celebrated films emerged. While Hong Kong was expected to maintain relative autonomy for fifty years, this privilege was likely to cease once it returns to Chinese sovereignty in 2047.[6] After the handover in 1997, China established Article Five as part of the written law:

“The socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.”[7]

Of course, this law has more to do with ideological optics than with de facto economic manifestations. Under the conditions of global capitalism, even mainland China has been operating as a largely capitalist market system while maintaining rhetorical claims to socialism in order to continue to justify its authoritarian government. The framework states that despite being a part of China, Hong Kong will continue to have its own separate legal and economic system from what might be understood as an administrative center in mainland China until 2047.

However, this 50-year period of liminality appears to be largely nominal. Hong Kong maintains historical connections with the West while remaining embedded in its context in the East. It also sustains inevitably shifting boundaries in its transnational context. (In this context, we take “transnational” particularly to signal “the simultaneous socio-cultural, economic, and political processes of local and cross-border participation, sociality, membership, connection, and identiﬁcation”[8]). Even if it is only a nominal phenomenon, however, it would certainly have been expected to create complications for the people of Hong Kong in fostering their own national identity. Such a transition promised increased tensions surrounding the capitalist and industrial contradictions that had already been a part of their society in the context of that socio-economic reality being absorbed into the authoritarian proto-capitalist political trajectory of the Chinese mainland.

In such contexts, Cheung, Marchetti, and Tan convincingly argue that

“historically critical times often inspire and motivate artists and cultural practitioners to reflect upon their own history and to grapple or come to terms with their current situations and future predicaments.”[9]

As concerns among the people of Hong Kong were increasing due to the city’s changing landscape and imminent political handover, independent filmmakers from the second new wave, such as Stanley Kwan, Mabel Cheung, and Wong Kar-wai, were inspired to communicate this collective anxiety in their films.


Rouge (1987), directed by Stanley Kwan. An Autumn’s Tale (1987), directed by Mabel Cheung. Both narratives feature tragic love stories and common themes such as loss, alienation and identity.

Although Kwan and Cheung innovate in important ways, Wong stands apart from these other filmmakers for his elusive poetic style. This style has fascinated and evaded scholars for decades, evidenced in the volumes of scholarship dedicated to the task of articulating Wong’s aesthetic styles. For example, David Bordwell vaguely refers to these aesthetics as “liquid atmospherics.”[10] Abbas argues that

“each film is elusive and surprising, not so much because it is different from other Wong Kar-wai films but because it is the same—a feature that Wong has in common with the great Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. The aesthetic principles of such work are not change and development, but repetition and memory.”[11]

Citing Ackbar Abbas’ Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997), Helen Hok-Sze Leung claims that “[w]hat is persistently repeated and remembered”[12] in Kar-wai’s contemporaneous cinema is “an experience of the negative.”[13] Leung further refers to this aesthetic experience as comprising a sense “of something elusive that is just out of grasp.”[14] This phenomenon results in what Abbas refers to as the oddly sensuous “erotics of disappointment.”[15] Similarly, Jean-Marc Lalanne argues that Wong “films the huge flow of contemporary images from the inside [and] hones them to an almost dizzying point of seductiveness.”[16] Lalanne proceeds to argue that

“at the same time [Wong] is not afraid to talk about the damage they do. Individuals are alone, orphaned, unfit for love, unable to exert the slightest influence on reality (always somewhere else out of reach).”[17]

However, Lalanne does not specify the source or subject of the damage done to individuals beyond this short list of alienated characteristics he assigns to them.

Brunette explains that “[i]n interviews, Wong has vaguely linked the political issue with a more general urban alienation that has come to seem normal.”[18] Shortly before the handover, Wong explained that, for example, “Days of Being Wild centers on various feelings about staying in or leaving Hong Kong. That’s less of an issue now that we’re so close to 1997. Chungking Express is more about the way people feel now.”[19] Contra Wong’s vague dismissal, however, his long-time cinematographer, Christopher Doyle (to whom much credit for Wong’s styles can be attributed) agrees that some of the aesthetics of Wong’s films are imbued with an anxiety that might have to do with a desire to halt the march of time towards the handover:

“I’ve always associated our ‘blurred action’ sequences with the adrenaline rush triggered by fear or violence. ... The idea is to suspend time, to emphasize and prolong the ‘relevance’ of whatever is going on.”[20]

Abbas further states that even though “we find no direct reference in any of these films to the political situation at all ... politics seems to be conspicuously absent in Wong’s films. What we do find, on the other hand, is something else, a more indirect relation.”[21] Abbas concedes,

“Something of these confusions [concerning Hong Kong’s uncertain political future leading up to the handover], a part of what [he calls] the experience of the negative, has seeped into Wong's films.”[22]

Indeed, Eric Greene (1998) convincingly argues,

“Even if artists do not consciously attempt to make ‘political statements,’ artists exist in a world of political and social relations. … We can reasonably expect therefore that, consciously or not, political realities, events, and themes will register in an artist’s work. In fact we should be shocked if a country’s political conflicts and social biases do not find their way into its cultural productions.”[23]

For all of his discussion of aesthetics in Wong’s film, Peter Brunette (2005) makes only one reference to anxiety in his entire book, although it is tellingly attached to the 1997 handover:

“In 1984, mainland Chinese and British authorities agreed to the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic in 1997. Hence, the ticking clock, in Wong’s ﬁlms ... became a natural metaphor for all the fear and anxiety attached to this change.”[24]

Discussing Chungking Express in particular, Brunette foregrounds “the political aspect of the ﬁlm, which is, for once, undeniable. Since Chungking Express is actually set in present-day Hong Kong, there is a clear political subtext to whatever happens in it.”[25] While Abbas acknowledges the handover as a determining factor to the “negativity” and “melancholy” in Wong’s films, most of his analysis becomes descriptive of the films’ aesthetics, missing the opportunity to parse specific formal and aesthetic elements for their thematizing of the social anxiety pertaining to the handover.[26] Abbas concludes that,

“as noted, there is very little reference in Wong’s cinema to the political situation. Moreover, his films after 1997 continue with the same set of concerns. It will be necessary therefore to think about disappearance in another way: not as vanishing without a trace, and not as absence, but rather as problematic presence, as dis-appearance.”[27]

Abbas then proceeds with his descriptions of the aesthetic conventions in Wong’s films with little further connection to the 1997 handover.

In this contribution, we tether the aesthetics in these films to a particular historical moment and a specific socio-political anxiety in an effort to anchor an understanding of this highly sensuous aesthetic. Wong’s films embody the “sensuous aesthetics” described by Gary Bettinson in “Partial Views: Visual Style and Aesthetic of Disturbance.” He argues that these particular aesthetics cause viewers to “become absorbed in the film at a purely aesthetic level.”[28] Wong puts these sensuous aesthetics to use in the service of an almost universal concern with the social subject of Hong Kong, either in the films’ immediate settings or by symbolic absentia. For example, narratively he carries the viewer along on the journeys of his characters who often aimlessly wander around the city, an experience that prompts the viewer to discover the struggles they face within this era of transience.[29] While many of the urban and social anxieties that are presented in Wong’s films date well back into the pre-handover period, actual social anxiety levels increased as the Hong Kong populace was “faced with the uncomfortable possibility of an alien identity about to be imposed on it from China.” As Abbas so succinctly encapsulates the scenario, Hong Kong residents were “experiencing a kind of last-minute collective search for a more definite identity.”[30] In this liminality, Wong brings attention to the cultural anxieties shared among native Hong Kong subjects in regard to Hong Kong’s changing political landscapes.

Three themes emerge that pertain to each film’s evolving historical moment. Cumulatively these themes are developed by a sensuous aesthetic anxiety specifically concerned with the 1997 take-over and the following period of liminality. The first surrounds an anxiety pertaining to a perceived disappearance of the city’s sociocultural space into atomized imagined havens of fantasy, the second embodies a concomitant alienating search for shared identity and memory, and the third evolves into a nostalgic anxiety arising from the perceived loss of Hong Kong’s pre-handover past. Collectively, these three films, understood from the perspective of the sensual aesthetic anxiety that Wong’s films engender, share themes, narratives, formal elements, cinematic styles and techniques, and ideological and political implications that reflect and mutually constitute the cultural anxieties in Hong Kong.