Counting Down on the Train to 2046 in West Kowloon: A Deep Map of Hong Kong’s Spectral Temporalities

This paper maps the spectral temporalities of Hong Kong in the wakes of the official opening of the high-speed rail link in West Kowloon. Probing the spectral figurations of time in the city through Jacques Derrida’s spectrality discourse, the paper connects spectrality with the method of “deep mapping” as proposed by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in Theatre/Archaeology
(2005). This method aligns the poetic with the discursive, the fictional and the historical in order to set up an alternative archive of a locale with narratives that traverse and overlay the past, the present, and the future. I consider the notion of time through the act of “counting down” to 1997 and to 2047, and center this deep map on the site of West Kowloon. The reflection is placed in the context of the high-speed rail link, Wong Kar-wai’s train to 2046, a censored, or “disappeared” artwork originally presented on the International Commerce Centre (ICC) by Sampson Wong Yu-hin and Jason Lam Chi-fai “Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now / Countdown Machine” (2016), and the West Kowloon Cultural District.