Blankness (留白): Revisiting the Future of Nostalgia
Item
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Title
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Blankness (留白): Revisiting the Future of Nostalgia
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Description
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In the era of “Make America Great Again” and other populist movements, an increasing demand for fictions of nativity has marked the global zeitgeist. In fear of racial, national, or cultural identity disappearance, we eagerly look at the past, whether accurate or not, to enforce our modern-day personhood with a collective identity.
Urban appearance and iconicity supply our demand with nostalgia, upholding these fictions we so desire. But as the late Harvard philosopher Svetlana Boym warns, these architectures can either be used to innocently reflect upon history or sensationalized to stoke right-wing populism.
In Shanshui painting, the artistic technique of Liú Bái (留白—“leave blank”) is the compositional technique of synthesizing ink and blankness. “Blankness” in this context is a relative notion to the other presences on the rice paper canvas; it is not to be confused with absolute whiteness. Liú Bái affords a universality for viewers to subjectively interpret the blank in relation to the inked figures.
This thesis borrows from Liú Bái in hopes of capturing this subjective and nondeterministic quality to foster new collectives, identities, and communities on the test site of Queen's Road, Hong Kong. Until we depart from this paradigm of intense identity insecurity, Liú Bái aims to sidestep the over-determining gaze of the zeitgeist. What is proposed here is not a tabula-rasa emptiness, nor a laissez-faire conservation of as-found urban conditions, but something in between. Something that is intentionally “Liú Bái.”
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Creator
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CHAN, TOBY (YUNG TO)
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Subject
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blankness
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hong kong
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liu bai
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nostalgia
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populism
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Queen's road
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Architecture
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Asian studies
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Design
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Contributor
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Holder, Andrew
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Date
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2023-01-06T04:12:54Z
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2023
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2023-01-05
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2023-03
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2023-01-06T04:12:54Z
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Type
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Thesis or Dissertation
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text
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Format
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application/pdf
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application/pdf
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Identifier
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CHAN, TOBY (YUNG TO). 2022. Blankness (留白): Revisiting the Future of Nostalgia. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
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30244786
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https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37373976
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0000-0001-6058-6873
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Language
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en