mass-populated and hyperactive spaces: william chang

My final post for the Blog-A-Thon takes us away from Europe and into Asia: we're going to be taking a look at the work of William Chang, Wong Kar-Wai's longtime production designer. All of their collaborations have phenomenal production design—I considered, briefly, trying to tackle their 2004 project 2046—but the one I'd like to look at today is a much earlier one, Chungking Express (1994).

Chungking Express is a pair of love stories set in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is one of the densest cities on Earth, and correspondingly, there's not a shot in the entire film that doesn't take place in some kind of built environment, providing a special challenge for the production designer.

In Chang and Kar-Wai's vision of the city, Hong Kong is strikingly evoked as an elaborate labyrinth of infrastructural space, apartments, shops, corridors, restaurants, clandestine workspaces, and unclassifiable combinations of the above. Behold:

[Much of the distinctive look of this film stems from the choice to film portions of it within the Chungking Mansions, a sprawling building described by Wong Kar-Wai as a "mass-populated and hyperactive place," and a "great metaphor for [Hong Kong] herself." The Chungking Mansion Wikipedia page is absolutely fascinating reading.]

Labels: city, media commentary, projects, spaces

Sunday, May 25, 2008
2:10 PM
0 comments

where i've been and what i've been up to

Busy week.

Spent the last three or four days down in Houston, with K., holed up in a Sheraton near the airport. Got out for a bit and walked around, taking photos of the concrete drainage systems and ruined parking lots surrounding the airport. Think of it as a way to renew my FOVICKS membership (that's Friends Of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures, for those of you following along at home).

There's a whole Ballard-esque novel waiting to be written about the rings of strange infrastructure that airports extrude, and perhaps another one about Houston infrastructure more generally. It is a city (like LA perhaps) which is designed to be nagivable only by automobile: it is almost incomprehensible when on foot. If we really have moved into the downslope of the peak oil bell curve, then Houston will one day be nothing more than a cryptic artifact. You heard it here first!

When I wasn't wandering around making doomsday prophecies, I was mostly surfing the Internet. It was costing me $9.95 a day at the Sheraton (bastards), so I decided to make it Worth My While, which included making a Facebook page (which you may or may not be able to see through that link) and setting up a Last.fm / Audioscrobbler account. Whoa, Last.fm is very cool, by the way, I did not know it. It is not exactly del.icio.us for iTunes, but that is the way I would begin explaining it to someone:

I like it more than the music-criticism aggregator Critical Metrics. I've found some good music through Critical Metrics, but aggregating criticism in that way leads one towards the "predictable imbalance" inherent in power law distributions (link for math / stat geeks only). There are various ways to avoid this problem in Critical Metrics, but it's a lot easier to avoid via Last.fm. That is all!

Labels: city, houston, personal

Tuesday, September 04, 2007
11:31 AM
2 comments

2011 archive >>

2010 >>

2009 >>

2008 >>

2007 >>

2006 >>

2005 >>

2004 >>

2003 >>

2002 >>

rss (xml)