When demolition clears a neighbourhood—its rooftops, its makeshift homes—and a municipal park takes its place, what endures?
Phantom of the Eternal City follows the life cycle of a city through works in the M+ Collections. Adapted from an essay by Iven Cheung and directed by Isaac Shek and Sammy Wong, the animated film folds photographs into its drawn world, giving vanished streets the texture of something half-remembered.
The Kowloon Walled City is where the idea takes hold. Photographs by Ryuji Miyamoto, Ian Lambot, and Greg Girard each offer a different portrait of the demolished enclave: Miyamoto captures the settlement mid-erasure, its hollowed structures dwarfing the workers pulling them down, while Lambot and Girard reveal the everyday resilience of the residents.
Do you believe this place before me once existed in this city?
But it is not all elegy. In Weng Fen’s Sitting on the Wall (2002), young women perch above expanding skylines, gazing at futures still under construction. Liu Heung Shing’s China After Mao—Skating in Dalian (1981) strikes a playful note, while Anzai Shigeo photographs artists at work in parks and plazas, depicting the city as a playground.
Yet ruin is never far away. anothermountainman (Stanley Wong Ping Pui) photographs a castle-like structure alone in a field, its spires skeletal, half-finished, and Zeng Han finds sites inhabiting the halfway house between built form and relic. For Shek and Wong, the city builds as readily as it consumes, though never quite fast enough to erase those who once dwelled within it.
About Cross-Cuts
Cross-Cuts is a video essay series from M+ that cuts across curatorial disciplines—visual art, moving image, and design and architecture—to draw unexpected connections between works in the museum’s collections. Each episode pairs a writer from outside of M+ with a video director, weaving objects together under a shared theme.