Wet Spaces explores the negotiations of ‘wetness’, water and wet matter in spatial histories of Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. This project develops on from Chan’s PhD research, which focused on the spatial negotiations and design navigations of consumption spaces alongside and within public housing estates in Hong Kong, with an emphasis on the everyday resistances of such spaces. These spaces include the most mundane spaces of colonial modernity, including hawkers, bazaars, markets and commercial complexes. The materiality of space was a key factor in assessing the ways that public housing residents in Hong Kong navigated and negotiated consumption spaces in the estate complex. In the case of the development of markets, this space embodied ideas of ‘wetness’ in the negotiation of the spatial design. In the ‘wet market’, wetness permeated public space through the notion of fresh foods, the keeping and slaughter of live animals, and in the spatial responses to weather, decay and detritus. Hong Kong is also significantly affected by its relation to the water, through its bays and islands, the network of smaller rivers and nullahs, the weather, and resources from the water. Wet Spaces will expand on these ideas through a theoretical exploration of wetness as a conduit between people and public space, and how this manifest in both structures of control and strategies for resistance.
The objective of the project is to develop conceptual frameworks for speculative and sensorial engagement as part of a broader design historical methodology in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. This project engages Chan’s background as a design historian and creative practitioner to activate an embodied approach to historical enquiry, with the goal to develop a set of research frameworks that can connect spatial histories inter-regionally. This research project will therefore explicitly tie these material histories together through spatial examples to further investigate new connective threads in the study of Hong Kong. This speaks to the present-day challenges and opportunities in discourses of Hong Kong, as the on-going transformation of public space calls for urgent critical engagement and analysis. During the fellowship, Chan will be working on three main strands within the project: academic publishing, collaborative enquiry, and a workshop framework and pedagogical toolkit on wetness and embodied research in Asian Studies.