HKHC Speaker's Series, Dr. Liza Wing Man Kam, University of Vienna, Austria

Description

HKHC Speaker's Series, Dr. Liza Wing Man Kam, University of Vienna, Austria

Learn to oppress: Intellectual trajectory in constructing the colonies in Hong Kong and Taiwan
Speaker: Dr. Liza Wing Man Kam, University of Vienna, Austria
Date and Time: 7 Mar 2025, 3:30 – 5pm (UKT)
Venue: Research Space, Arts Complex, University of Bristol
Language: English

In-person only event.

This presentation introduces components of Kam’s recent project, which aims to comprehend the cultural and intellectual exchange networks in and between Hong Kong and Taiwan. In her previous works, Kam contended that infrastructural and socialization frameworks work together to subtly and overtly exert control on the colonials’ bodies and minds. This presentation, however, focuses on Japan’s learning from British colonialism in Hong Kong to understand how the early form of control got in shape. Since the early colonial period, metropolitan London has played a significant role in shaping the spatial design and planning, law-making, and so on in Hong Kong. By the end of the Second World War, the majority of Hong Kong’s public architecture and planning were dictated by British colonial architects. However, Taiwan’s case is not as straightforward. In becoming a modern state, Japanese officials such as Ohara Shigechika, the head of the Office for Gaols (shugokushi) were sent to visit the Victoria Prison in Hong Kong in 1871 to learn about the construction of modern prisons during the Meiji Restoration. In 1872, Ishida Eikichi, the Superintendent of Police for Kanagawa Prefecture travelled to Hong Kong to research police systems (Umemori, 2002). The modernization of metropolitan Tokyo was significantly influenced by the colonial experience in Hong Kong. These ideas, which were tested in Tokyo, were subsequently exported to colonial Taiwan. During the early Japanese colonial era in Taiwan, it functioned as a laboratory for Japanese colonial architects such as Ide Kaoru (1879-1944) and Moriyama Matsunosuke (1869-1949). These architects were educated at the then Tokyo Imperial University (Tōkyō teikoku daigaku), where they were, in some ways, instructed by British architecture professors.

Still in its inaugural shape, the project explores the intellectual trajectories involved in the (re)making of the infrastructural and socialization frameworks established since the two respective colonial eras, while identifying the legacies that persist as physical and ideological control in the everyday.

Dr. Liza Wing Man Kam’s research interests include Hong Kong and Taiwan’s colonial architecture and the transmutation in their particular postcolonial settings, postwar cultural and urban spaces, and culinary cultures. She conducted her PhD research at the Bauhaus in Germany and have been teaching and researching in Germany, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US and Japan.

Period	7 Mar 2025
Held at	Department of History (Historical Studies)