Hong Kong people are still living in memory of 1997 which poses as a provocation to change and a point to evaluate. But change after 1997 is still difficult to grasp. Behind this change HK in fact has negotiated various processes of social mutations, colonial history, capitalism and international economy. These actively find expressions in various cultural forms.
Most of cultural expressions have centered their discussions on elusion of the “floating identity” and “cultural desert” or a search for a more definite identity. HK people have cultivated a great interest in local culture, but the most innovative and critical responses come from those who articulate their cultural expressions with new perspectives and dimensions.
Ann Hui is one of the local filmmakers who can demonstrate this strength. She, toqetherwith other filmmakers like Isui Hark and Wong Kar-wai, has come up with new cinematic images in response to the historical situations of Hong Kong. They represent many disparate attempts to evoke a problematic cultural space in which a new Hong Kong subjectivity is found. Since 1982, their innovative film practices have inspired a “new Hong Kong cinema” which places Hong Kong as a subject itself. As Abbas suggests, “the new Hong Kong cinema claims our attention because it has finally found a subject-it has found itself as a subject.”It is a response to “a space of disappearance”, a cultural space in which Hong Kong subject is self-invented. In short, Hong Kong cinema has evolved into a medium capable of giving new expressions to shape Hong Kong subjectivity, for instances, through constructing images out of cliches, problematizing our viewing process and experimenting new cinematic techniques. Ann Hui is able to articulate her cinematic expressions in response to Hong Kong changing cultural space. Her works is a way of ref raming and reinventing to avoid a civilization of cliché in Hong Kong culture. Her filmpractice involves not only a conversion from the genre norms, the narrative logic and the market rules, but also a creation of new filmic images which are deviant, complex and inconsistent, forming discontinuities within continuities in appropriation of the changing local environment.
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