Borderscaping Hong Kong: Lo Ting and its Creative Agency

Lo Ting, a mythical half-human and half-fish figure, has been appropriated by local cultural workers since 1997. Based on the 1998 exhibition ‘Hong Kong Reincarnated: New Lo Ting Archaeological Find’ and the film Three Husbands (Fruit Chan, 2018), this article examines the creative agencies of Lo Ting from the perspective of ‘borderscaping’. The study affirms borderscaping as active signifying, discursive and affective practices that involve dynamic processes of adaptation, contestation or resistance in the subject-making of Hong Kong people. Set in two different contexts, post-1997 and post-2014, both productions have arguably sought a new form of becoming or belonging, and envisaged the Hong Kong/China border as something that can (or cannot) be crossed, interpreted and reinvented rather than passively inhabited. By offering new (geo)political-cultural imaginations, they have sought a new spatiality of politics, shifting from the rigid territorial spatialities of the nation-state to representing, negotiating and contesting the ‘where’ of the border.