Leo Ou-fan Lee
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Leo Ou-fan Lee is
currently the Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese
Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Born in China, he was brought up in Taiwan and went
to the United States for
graduate education where
he received his Ph. D. degree from Harvard in
1970. He has taught at Harvard, UCLA, Chicago, Indiana, and Princeton Universities in the United States, as well
as the University of Hong
Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His scholarly publications
in English include: Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New
Form of Urban Culture, 1930-1945 (Harvard University
Press, 1999), Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Indiana University
Press, 1987), The Romantic
Generation of Modern Chinese
Writers (Harvard, 1973), City between Worlds: My Hong Kong
(Harvard University Press, 2008), and Musings: Reading Hong Kong, China and the World
(Hong Kong: Muse Books, 2011). In Hong Kong, he is known as both
a scholar and cultural critic
and has published more than 20 books in Chinese across a wide spectrum of subjects: literature, Hong Kong
culture, film, classic music, and architecture. |
abstract
Shanghai Past
and Present: Some Cultural Reflections
(Abstract)
Fifteen years since my book, Shanghai Modern, was first published (1999), I find myself a somewhat
alienated stranger in the
city I wrote about. The new
Shanghai has “incorporated”
the old Shanghai in a dizzying
drive for global “super-modernism”. What has exactly happened?
What does all this mean
for a cultural historian and critic
now residing in Hong Kong?
My reflections are based on several recent trips to Shanghai, where I toured the “old sites” as well as the newly
developed areas in Pudong. I have talked with local scholars and architects and read a number of their works in the hope of forming an overall impression (if not theory).
In this keynote speech I plan to offer my personal reflections on a number of new or
renovated urban sites (the bridges and buildings on the Bund, the Xintiandi, the new Pudong skyscrapers, the “Massenet Cultural district” etc.) in order to
gauge the cultural implications
of this new urban profile: Is Shanghai indeed becoming a “global
city”? Is cultural nostalgia on its way out or serves merely as an excuse
for building a global metropolis? What
considerations lay behind the architectural designs of these new and huge buildings by international architectural firms in the name of honoring “Chinese
culture”? How do Shanghai residents themselves think of such changes in the “self-portrait” of their city? If so, what does
all this mean for Hong Kong as the “Other” city in this much retold “Tale of Two Cities”?
Wherever relevant, I shall
also draw upon the writings of famous cultural theorists and architects (Koolhaas, Richard Rogers, Herzog and de Meuron) and
the examples of other Asian
and European cities (Seoul,
Singapore, Berlin) for comparison.