ASIA 325: Hong Kong Cinema
Photo Collage – A Creative Response to Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express
By Anthea Mak, Chase Vincent, Harrison Sun, and Robbie Laughlen
Project Rationale:
“After watching the film, the team determined that it had extremely strong themes that we all connected with. Chungking Express is a film marked by Wong Kar-wai’s personal style, where the use of filmic language exhibits strong thematic elements. However, we had differing interpretations of what these themes meant to us and what they represented. The fact that we could all identify with the themes brought up in a movie from Hong Kong in 1994, while living in Vancouver, shows the timelessness and universality that film can embody. By offering our own personal interpretations of the film’s messaging and adapting it into our own lives, we are encouraging viewers of the collage to reflect on their own interpretations of the themes presented.
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The choice of a photo collage also invites comparison, as the individual photos are part of a bigger picture. It encourages audiences to draw parallels across different people’s styles and interactions with the themes. We hope this comparison will entice people to think about how these themes exist in their own lives, and to capture a certain time within our, and Vancouver’s, lives that can be looked back on, just like Wong Kar-wai did with 1994 Hong Kong. We decided to have the collage mimic the film poster, overlaying it onto our photos, as the themes and interpretations captured in our photos are all part of the movie. In addition, the seemingly disorganized nature of the photos put together is a deliberate technique as it reflects the sense of chaos, the desperation to seek love, and even the reconstruction of memory…”