Research Projects

This oral history project aims to document the voices of Hong Kong leftist film workers who were active from 1949 to 1966 and to utilize their voices to reconstruct Cold War Hong Kong history. The principal investigator adopts the common usage of the term “leftist” during this era, defining leftist film workers as those who worked for the three major leftist film studios and the sole distributor of films made in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Until the mid-1960s, leftists controlled a significant share of the Hong Kong film market, produced popular movies and exported their productions and PRC-made films to other Chinese communities

The project regards “written languages” as a combined perspective from Joseph Yau and City Magazine. Through the study of this important local writer and the development of City in 1970s and 80s, it aims to examine the complicated interrelation between written languages and identities and investigate the process of local identity building. We would like to advocate the inclusiveness and open-mindedness of “localness” in Yau and City. It is true that this project places a strong focus on local literature, history and culture. As we know that international approach is very critical in success of our research, we will place Yau and City in the whole picture of international politics and western cultures which are highly influential to Hong Kong during the period concerned.

Art museums are places where students learn from original artworks. Previous scholarship on museum education has placed the emphasis either on visitors’ experiences or on outcomes of learning gained from museum visits. There is a lack of empirical research into group dialogue – the most used education strategy in museums and the most basic component of teaching in classrooms. The proposed study will investigate the group dialogues conducted by teachers with students in museums and classrooms. Three modes of dialogue proposed by Hubard (2015) – predetermined, thematic and open – will be tested with primary school teachers and students. ‘Design-based research’, a method to identify improvements systematically from experiments in learning situations, will be the methodology employed. The study will be conducted in three phases. Phase 1 will involve the preparation of teacher participants for leading group dialogues and curriculum plan development. Ten teachers and about 270 sixth-grade students (age 12) from different primary schools will be invited to participate in the study. Five workshops on effective group dialogue strategy will be conducted for the teacher participants. They will develop two five- to six-week curriculum plans with each incorporating one museum visit. Phase 2 will focus on the implementation of the plans with the support of the investigators and the evaluation of teachers’ and students’ performance in the group dialogue. Data will be obtained from the teachers’ reflections, interviews, observations and video recordings of museum visits and classroom teaching before, during and after the implementation of the plans. Phase 3 will be the data analysis stage. Taking the Hong Kong context into consideration, the results of the study will be used to create a pedagogical model that is theoretically and practically sound. The study is particularly meaningful given the increased emphasis that has been placed on learning art criticism in the new Education Bureau Visual Arts (VA) curriculums. In the revised VA curriculum for primary one to secondary three levels, it is explicitly stated that art making should be learned in connection with art criticism. The study will also be a timely response to the development of the West Kowloon Cultural District. In 2019, the Museum+ will be launched and the Hong Kong Museum of Art will be re-opened after renovation. There will be numerous opportunities for students and members of the public to visit these purpose-built museums. In this connection, an educated audience and refined museum practices are much needed.

This project analyses the Polish community of Harbin from its beginnings in the 1890s to its end in the 1940s by focusing on institutions and practices of Polish schooling in that city.

In the ITE4 document (2014), the fourth strategy on information technology in education proposed a new ‘e-learning policy’ to unleash the learning power of students. In the field of music education, the use of ICT in music composition has been studied since 2000. From the framework of Webster's (2003) model of creative thinking, the connection between music composition and creativity has been established. In 2013, Webster claimed that musical intelligence that involves composition is intimately connected to the model of creative thinking in music. He suggests two reasons why compositional thinking by students is vitally important. One is to increase musical intelligence and the other is to increase the likelihood of creative achievement. The definition of music composition intelligence is that students have a natural capacity for thinking in sound for compositional purposes and this capacity is not just a talent for ‘gifted’ individuals but a natural part of what might be considered musical intelligence that is present to some extent in all. However, no empirical study has been conducted to support music composition intelligence. To extend my doctoral study, the research objective is to examine how secondary students demonstrate their innate abilities in using computers to compose by observing their compositional approaches under the musical intelligence (MI) of Gardner’s framework (2006) and compositional thinking within Webster’s model of creative thinking (2003) in order to validate their compositional intelligence. To further investigate the compositional intelligence in secondary students aged from 12 (F.1) to 15 (F.4) during their computer-assisted compositional process at a band one secondary school, this empirical research is a one-year study to capture their compositional process through collecting quantitative data (file analysis) and qualitative data (reflective journals, focus group interviews and video observations). A songwriting project for F.1 students and a classical composition project for F.4 students will be taught. The ICT music curriculum will be framed into 12 weeks with a prescriptive task in the first semester and a free task in the second semester. Digital composition files and reflective journals are collected each week. During the digital file analysis, different compositional approaches in popular and classical music are observed. From the reflective journal, different stages of students’ compositional behaviours are mapped under the framework of Webster (2003). Therefore, students’ compositional approaches and compositional thinking are revealed, from popular music to classical music, and open-end to closed-end tasks, in a proposed model of music composition intelligence.

This project will investigate the experiences of eight English language teachers in Hong Kong during their initial years of full-time teaching.

The objective of this research project is to empirically investigate how non-literary translation practitioners and translation clients perceive translator professionalism, which is understood as not only involving knowledge and expertise but also the virtues of trustworthiness and altruism.

Literature and photography are often regarded as sister arts, their cominglings latent in the very etymology of the word “photography” meaning “writing with light.” While many scholars have studied their productive interactions, there is scant scholarly work about the use of photography as a trope or metaphor in literary texts. This project aims to shift the scholarship from an intense focus on text-image relations to the presence and function of verbalized or narrated images in literary texts. Some scholars have propounded the textuality of images by viewing images as texts that can be read and deciphered (Mitchell 1995, Petit 2006), but none have analysed the narrated image in literature.

本計劃試圖從現代中國文學研究史的角度入手，全面整理陳寅恪有關文學的論述，闡明他的文學觀念，並且深入辨析他的研究方法與前人的異同。

The object of this project is the poetic treatments of everyday modernity in 1970s Hong Kong, but not restricted to the four basic necessities "yishizhuxing" (衣食住行).

This proposed study will examine the development of Cantonese narrative in ethnic minority children of Hong Kong with special focus on three sub-groups, namely, Indian, Pakistani, and Nepalese, who are commonly called South Asians.

A review of the current literature on developing students’ critical response to visual arts reveals a heavy reliance on using art criticism models in schools. The learning of art criticism is generally seen as an engagement of students in various language tasks, such as describing, analysing, interpreting and evaluating. Geahigan (2002) disagrees with the view that the learning of art criticism is a discursive practice and conceptualises it as a process of inquiry. Building on the theory of Geahigan, the present study aims to develop, field-test and evaluate an inquiry-based model for learning art criticism. Using ‘design research’, a systematic and rigorous method of seeking out tested improvements in learning situations, as the principal methodology, the study will develop and test a pedagogic model that will enhance students’ critical ability in art criticism. The study will be conducted in three phases. Phase 1 will involve the preparation of eight teacher participants in the understanding of various art criticism models and the development of inquiry-based art criticism curriculum plans. Phase 2 will focus on the implementation of the curriculum plans. The investigators will observe three to five lessons and advise on the refinement of the plans. In Phase 3 the effectiveness and outcomes of the inquiry-based art criticism teaching on students will be investigated. Data will be obtained from interviews of teacher participants, classroom observations, video-recorded lessons, and the pre-testing and post-testing of student performance in written texts of art criticism. The data collected will be examined in relation to current theories on learning art criticism, and used to develop a pedagogical model which is theoretically and practically sound, taking into consideration the Hong Kong context. Addressing the gap between the theorisation, development, and implementation of inquiry-based art criticism learning, the project is important at this time, when the Senior Secondary Curriculum and the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination are being launched. Both the new curriculum and the examination place a strong emphasis on art appreciation, criticism and inquiry. The development of a critical audience has also become particularly important since the first phase of the West Kowloon Cultural District project will be coming to realisation as early as 2015. The study will represent a timely effort to answer many of the questions raised by the community, schools, teachers and students about the development of the critical ability of our next generation.

This project will use the main corpus of Leung’s works as examples to demonstrate how he brings these apparently disparate but actually connected topics under the umbrella of Hong Kong modernism and helps to enrich the meaning of the literary movement.

Traditionally, Cantonese opera artists strived to develop individual unique artistic style. Since the mid-20th Century, various artists have successfully established their own personal style recognized by the audience. Nowadays there is anecdotal evidence that some practicing artists are hesitant in developing their own style but are imitating the performance styles of established virtuosi. In what ways the artists’ conceptions of creativity have changed over time and why today’s audience seem to have accepted or even come to appreciate this shift have not been investigated. While creativity is regarded as one of the most important generic competences in the West, the notion of creativity in relation to oriental traditional arts, such as Cantonese opera has been a neglected research area. This proposed research project will be significant in addressing three critical issues that impact on the future development of Cantonese opera: (1) the nature of creativity demonstrated by eminent artists in the 20th century; (2) the extent to which the conceptions of creativity in Cantonese opera have changed from the perspectives of practicing artists and learners; (3) how artistic creativity can be re-valued by the profession and audience. The study will be undertaken in three phases. Phase 1 involves a musical analysis of selected audio-video recordings by different artists with a focus of similarity and differences in personal interpretation. Through an ethnographic study at two local Cantonese opera institutions, Phase 2 aims to investigate how the socio-cultural contexts in Hong Kong affect the development of Cantonese opera. Through observation of classes and interviews with stakeholders, an updated understanding can be obtained. Phase 3 aims to solicit the perspectives of current practicing artists, connoisseurs and beginners on their views of creativity in Cantonese opera. A mixed method with both qualitative and quantitative tools will be employed, including a questionnaire survey of the groups, and in-depth interviews with voluntary respondents. This study will document and provide evidence to account for the development of artistic creativity in Cantonese opera. It will reveal the particular characteristics of creativity in the genre and the extent to which conceptions of creativity held by both artists and patrons are influenced by socio-cultural contexts. The findings will enrich the current understanding of Chinese creativity as applied to Cantonese opera, and serve as a useful reference for developing and implementing programmes for general education and training of future artists, as well as stimulating current artists in the pursuit of creativity.

The prevalent theory traces the origins of Chinese fiction to the Wei and Jin Dynasties and considers the Tang Dynasty the time when they emerged fully fledged. With the advancement of archaeological works in China, this theory is gradually being challenged by excavated works of fiction dated to the Warring States and the Qin and Han periods. However, questions such as what are the stylistic features of early Chinese fiction and how did the fiction genre developed from that of historical writing remain to be answered. The purpose of this project is to focus on Mutienzi zhuan (The Travels of King Mu) to answer the above questions. As the earliest excavated text that survives into the modern age in Chinese history, our research on Mutienzi zhuan involves multiple aspects. We will start with a textual study of the text from a paleographical perspective, then move on to date its contents by comparing the text against documented bronze sources. The third step is to analyze the stylistic features of Mutienzi zhuan by comparing it with selected early fiction from other cultures, such as The Golden Ass, One Thousand and One Nights, and Mesopotamian mythologies, and to investigate the authorship, readership, transmission, and consumption of early Chinese fiction from a social perspective. The last step is to distinguish between the real and imagined geography in the text and reconstruct the transportation geography of King Mu’s travels using a historical geographical approach. It is hoped that this comprehensive research on Mutienzi zhuan will contribute to the study of Chinese paleography, history, geography and literature.

Starting from the 1990s, the number of artists, dealers, curators, critics and collectors in China has grown exponentially. Apart from the record high prices which has caught the attention of the international media, contemporary Chinese art has become a hot topic and form of luxury goods - both within and outside the art world. Apart from the machinations of the art market, the era has also seen proponents of “culture”, fostering a national strategy in order to fill the ideological gap left by the social problems associated with China’s economic reforms. This strategy became a trend of thought among elites and government officials. Ever since the 17th Party Congress, the tagline, "enhance culture as part of soft power” became the official “guiding ideology” of the Chinese Communist Party in its plan for sustainable development. In recent years, the term "Chinese Dream" has been adapted to promote China's "soft power" by exhibiting modern Chinese values locally and globally. If contemporary Chinese art presents a set of conditions whereby players in the art market and institutions are able to directly or indirectly involve themselves in the monetary, symbolic and political exchange of art, those proposed conditions have prompted me to consider how contemporary art museums have aligned with the implementation of the national policy of “soft power.” To that end, in this project, I will study a few private museums that have been established in recent years in Shanghai, which include the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum, and the Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum. This project aims to by-pass conventional art history approaches. Instead, it employs an ethnographical approach to investigate the story of contemporary Chinese art and its connection and relevance to the specific spaces and practices of the proposed museums. By evaluating recent Chinese cultural policies and providing my own descriptive experience that is informed by the narrative model of this project, this research will draw on insights from different players’ participation of museum activities to explain how individuals are inspired by the potentialities of the new locations of art production and consumption. The study will aim to question the shifting relationship of contemporary art to the state under the backdrop of the current cultural policy and how the establishment of contemporary art museums has become an important benchmark of cultural reform and urban renewal.

This project attempts to thoroughly study the melodies of tōgaku (Tang music) in Motomasa no Fue-fu (The Flute Score of Motomasa), an early twelfth-century Japanese source. Tōgaku was a repertory of entertainment music imported from China between the seventh and the ninth centuries, and was widely performed by musicians and aristocrats at the imperial court until its decline in the late fourteenth century. Japanese musicians compiled a large number of musical scores for the purposes of preservation and transmission of this repertory in Japan. Numerous reliable manuscript copies of these historical scores, together with a small number of the originals, have survived in Japan to the present. Although substantial research has been conducted on the development of tōgaku in the light of the music recorded in historical scores compiled before the end of the fourteenth century, a crucial question remains to be answered. This pertains to the background for the emergence of a new system of rhythmic signs in the notation compiled in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. This system of rhythmic signs signifies a slightly different rhythmic structure of the melodies when compared with the structure indicated by the standard system. As historians of Japanese music know only too well, the importation of Chinese entertainment music was in fact part of the large-scale adoption of Chinese culture. This adoption was followed by a long process of assimilation of the imported culture in accordance with the needs of the Japanese. Given that the new system of rhythmic sign emerged in the period when the assimilation of Chinese culture reached its peak, it was likely the product of this assimilation. A thorough study of the tōgaku notation in Motomasa no Fue-fu may, therefore, shed important light on the development of this system of rhythmic signs since the score notates the tōgaku melodies performed during the apogee of adaptation of Chinese culture, namely the tenth and the eleventh centuries. This project will first elucidate and decipher the tablature signs and notational symbols in Motomasa no Fue-fu, and then followed by a transcription of the tōgaku notation. Through a comprehensive analysis of the transcribed melodies together with the textual information in Motomasa no Fue-fu, the project aims at uncovering the background for the use of a new system of rhythmic signs in the tōgaku notation and its cultural implications for the assimilation of Chinese cultures in Heian-period Japan.

Hong Kong television drama helped defined the Hong Kong identities, and its export into China has influenced generations of mainland audience. However, recent years has witnessed a “reverse flow”: many Hong Kong youngsters have taken an interest or developed a preference for television drama produced in China, such as Scarlet Heart (步步驚心), My Sunshine (何以笙簫默), and Eternal Love (三生三世十里桃花). This phenomenon is far from self-evident because all Hong Kongers’ national identifications drop after 2008, and this tendency is most evident in the youngsters. This project, thus, addresses an important and intriguing question: why, in light of significant anti-Mainland sentiments among Hong Kong youth, are Mainland TV dramas popular with this audience?

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of using mobile sequencing software namely Garageband for iOS and Walk Band for Android as a tool to facilitate music creation for the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Music Examination. Paper 3, Creating I, is one of the core papers of the HKDSE music examination. Although it is a core paper, there is a lack of teaching and learning materials specifically designed for this paper with the use of technology. GarageBand and Walk Band are multifunctional applications which can realize and record music in real-time. With this handy device, students can create music anytime and anywhere. There are two phases in this study: in Phase 1 a selected group of music teachers and senior secondary students will be interviewed and perceptions and suggestions will be derived to formulate a composition pedagogy with the use of the application with a theoretical framework and practical teaching approaches. Phase 2 will be a multi-case study in which three pilot schools will be involved and music classes will be observed with the launch of the pedagogy for three months. In addition, teachers and students will be interviewed in order to validate the pedagogy. This study will provide a practical and validated pedagogy for school music teachers to prepare students for the HKDSE Music Examination.

In the Hong Kong context, the secretarial profession was considered one of the first whitecollar jobs for women, and became an indispensable component of the city’s economy in the latter half of the 20th century when Hong Kong gradually evolved into an international financial center. This project will trace the history of this phenomenon by using Sacred Heart Canossian College of Commerce (SHCCC) as a case study.

This ECS project, drawing on a complexity theory and adopting an ethnographic case study design, seeks to explore teacher educators’ expertise at different stages of their career and how they (re)construct their expertise through different forms of professional practice (eg, teaching, research and practicum supervision) across time and contexts. The study will make a theoretical contribution to our understanding of teacher educator expertise by shedding light on its subject-specific and context-sensitive nature as well as its developmental process mediated by various influencing factors at personal, institutional and societal levels. The study can also generate implications on how to support teacher educators’ professional development at different stages of their career in higher education.

本研究計劃試圖以歐陽修、曾鞏、蘇軾對「鬼神」的認識為切入點，把他們的「文道觀念」 和「祈祭禮文」、「禮法行為」相聯繫。一方面作精細的個案研究，同時希望從更宏觀的角度，分析北宋文人如何理解「禮文」、「禮法」和「道」的關係。

In this project, I argue that through such autobiographical moments, contemporary authors are exploring the emergence of mass surveillance within democratic culture, focusing on what democracy and surveillance both enjoin: the appearances and self-representations of twenty-first century citizen-subjects.

This project aims to fill this research gap by developing and validating a coherent suite of language testing instruments (DiaWrite) to diagnose Hong Kong undergraduates’ relative strengths and weaknesses in writing academic essays in English.

Architectural heritage conservation and research emerged as a distinct profession and critical issue in Hong Kong with the implementation of the Heritage Conservation Policy in the 2007-08 Policy Address of the Hong Kong SAR Government. Since then, heritage conservation and education has been a matter of urgency and concern in local development policies. This research aims at rigorously re-examining modern architecture, Chinese culture and tradition, and colonial Hong Kong in architectural design of the early twentieth century. Building on the PI’s engagement with a non-profit organization in which she is a founding member to raise international public awareness regarding the historical significance of the modern movement in architecture (DOCOMOMO- Documentation and Conservation of buildings, sites and neighbourhoods of the Modern Movement- Hong Kong Chapter), this research will be rooted in both Western and Chinese academic discourse and research frameworks but emerge to formulate an improved direction for Hong Kong heritage policy and education in modern architecture. Research and interest in Chinese architects and architectural practices have been increasing in recent years. Wang (2008) focused on mainland Chinese architects in Hong Kong, but only in the period after 1949. Ho (2010) has noted that in the first half of the twentieth century, new knowledge was promoted by the construction industry in Hong Kong via new technology, and that contractors had promoted the modernisation of construction education and changed the traditional practice of apprenticeship starting in the mid-1930s (Ho 2010: 124). Besides contractors, architects were also at the forefront of experimentation in modernisation of the urban landscape. Research on early twentieth century architects Hong Kong architects, however, is still obscure, and only few and limited attempts exist. Until now there is only one publication of around ten ‘first-generation’ Chinese (two Eurasian) architects (Ng and Chu 2007). Ng and Chu’s publication, although important, is mainly a brief collection of the works of the individual architects, and does not go into depths to discuss how the Hong Kong architects mediated between traditional Chinese architectural forms and colonial prototypes to designing modern urban landscapes. The PI of this project has moreover discovered that one of the family members of an architect in this proposed research is related to the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen (Kwan 1997), but to date there is no information, besides this proposed project, that has attempted to unveil the intricate relationship of this family lineage upon the early modern urban development of Hong Kong. With the first group of overseas-educated Chinese architects returning to colonial Hong Kong in the 1920s-30s and establishing themselves as the pioneers of designing the modern city, this period witnessed the first signs of urban modernisation in Hong Kong. However, compared to Shanghai, Hong Kong was often deemed as the lesser “other”, specifically that the “island [of Hong Kong] did not go through architectural transformation in the 1930s as Shanghai did” (Lee 1999: 328). A decade and a half has passed since this statement, and new discoveries in academia, including this research, will place a new dimension and perspective in the previously underrated and neglected modern architectural and urban landscape of Hong Kong. This research documents demolished buildings and aims to not only preserve surviving works of Hong Kong and Chinese architects, but also effectively repositions local architectural history and modern cultural heritage. It will lay the foundations for public heritage educational work, delineate how the architecture reacted to Western colonial prototypes while adapting to Chinese traditions in the early twentieth century, and improve the current heritage policy to preserve the unique cultural heritage landscape in Hong Kong and Chinese architecture.

With discoveries of lavish Han tombs in recent decades, material of the Han Dynasty (206 BC– 220 AD) continues to proliferate. Studies of these unearthed Han artefacts have increased, but they are primarily based on a particular category of art objects or within a specific tomb excavation. Also, archaeological materials are generally perceived as alternative sources that can complement documentary materials. This project, by contrast, attempts to focus on a very different issue, that of imitation, as the central theme to explore and rethink the materiality and identity of different ritual objects within the context of tomb, and also the wider subjects of cultural and social practices, and beliefs in the Han Dynasty. Imitation was prevalent and constant in the material world, once distinctions of value began to occur among various materials. There are myriad examples of imitation throughout ancient China, such as ceramic ding tripods (鼎), wooden bi discs (璧), etc., showing that it was popular and understandable to use inexpensive material to imitate objects made of valuable primary material, such as bronze and jade. However, the authentic situation of imitation was conceivably far more complex in the Han Dynasty. For example, the existence of jade imitation was a case of reverse logic. Moreover, imitation not only occurred among various materials, but also between genuine objects and image representations. Building on the solid foundation of a substantial collection of primary sources, such as excavated artefacts and manuscripts, archaeological reports, mural paintings, stone engravings, museum collections, catalogues, and ancient literature materials, this project will establish a solid archive and basis for both current and future related studies. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, an attempt will be made to shed light on various significant but hitherto unnoticed cases of imitation during Han times, and to understand what incentivised the choice of material, revealing the embedded cultural and social value in the objects and fabrication. Besides using conventional historical methodology to study ancient literature materials, this project will largely rely on the archaeological data and employ art historical stylistic analyses; also a sociological approach will be adopted. More broadly, it will highlight the importance of studies on material culture as a way to enhance our understanding of the religious ideologies as well as the history of Han society.

The study contends that the cultural influence of the PRC on Hong Kong was significant during the Cold War era. In addition to exploring the cultural exchange across two ideological blocs, the project also proposes a solution to the problem of reception.

The present project will be the first to address this issue, exploring infants ’ relative sensitivity to and use of consonants, vowels and tones in Cantonese and French environments.