Kachun Alex Wong ’20 MArch Columbia GSAPP

WONG KACHUN ALEX CULTURE, JUSTICE, AND SOME OTHER STUFF...

2018-2020 SELECTED WORKS @ COLUMBIA GSAPP

CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20

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HORIZONTAL LOOP/ 17

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GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19

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VERTICAL LOOP/ 17

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STATION INUNDATION/ 19

CITY FARM/ 19

COLLAGE CITY/ 18

GENERATIVE DESIGN/ 18

LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18

DIAGONAL LOOP/ 17

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GREENPOINT THEATRE/ 18

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TECH + ART STREET/ 19

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HOUSING MIGRANTS AND THE DIASPORA/ 19

RENOVATION BY HONG KONG PROTESTERS AS COUNTER-ARCHITECTS/ 19

TEAR GAS AND AGENT ORANGE/20

PERRET THEATRE/ 17

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CRITIC: MARK WASIUTA COLLABORATORS: SNEHA AIYER (RESEARCH), ALEX WONG YEAR: SPRING 2020 BRIEF: RESEARCH PROJECT THAT HIGHLIGHTS THE TOXIC LEGACIES OF AGENT ORANGE ON VIETNAM ENVIRONMENTAL AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPES

CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20

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Our project investigates the space-scale and time-scale of the deployment operations of Agent Orange, and in the process, identify the accuracy and the inaccuracy of the quantification, measurement, and registration of the Vietnam War and its effects.

The project is inspired by the premise set out by Robert McNamara. With his background in working for Ford, a lot of the Fordist practices of the production line are carried to more complex problems of the war.

His obsession with making the numbers, in for example the ten counterinsurgent to one insurgent ratio, the Project 100,000 or McNamara’s 100,000, were known for the failures in generating accuracy in ground conditions, which some attribute to the ultimate defeat of the US.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 Our project foregrounds those controversies and formulates Vietnam War as a war on military measurement, evident in the government-contracted herbicide productions by multinational corporations such as Dow Chemicals and Monsanto, the prescription and circulation of drugs within the troops, thus rendering soldiers as laborers of wars, or human capital, whose performance can be optimized by an curated dosage of drugs, or in another way that chemicals play a role in the war, in the form of Agent Orange among other herbicides, in defoliation and preparing and reshaping the battleground, i.e. the jungle, as to open perceptions of soldiers operating in those unperceivable environments.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 This drawing zooms into South Vietnam in the context of its surroundings. The spray operations as mapped by the US Department of the Army, in relation to the topography and the communist-controlled territories, reveal that spray missions had constantly traversed boundaries of the state. A study of the geometries of the gas reveal that air as a medium relied on the last segment of distribution throughout the global circulation route is in fact highly instable, subject to wind patterns, humidity, temperature, terrain inconsistencies, and spatial layers of the jungle.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20

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This drawing correlates the multi-scalar dominance of different plant species in relation to the ergonometric scales of soldiers and weapons to show how effective Agent Orange is as a defoliating substance as part of constructing a war machine. Large drawbacks include the difference in effects on different plant species, the difference in reach compared between high and low tree canopies, and the time delay in which herbicide operates, in that the defoliation of higher plants such as the Dipterocarpaceae actually permits the light to enter the shrubs, thus proliferating the undergrowth of species such as elephant grass and imperata and bamboo, many of which are most significantly obstructions to the soldiers’ visions.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 In this drawing, the flows are across mediums, species, and generations, and can happen through direct exposure in breathing spray mist/dust, the ingestion of food products from contaminated waters or soil, and carried onto the next generation through blood streams and breast milk.

However, Efforts to study, record, and remediate the effects of Agent Orange are assorted and disorganized. The permeation and drift of it into many levels of the ecology and culture calls for a dioxin laboratory, A dioxin laboratory should be a new space and program where the fluxes of agent orange are monitored and experimented across the mediums between air, water, and soil.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 A Luoi Valley

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My first design move is to link the idea of evidence landscape with the computerized drawing of flight paths during these spray missions. A landscape is created as a terracing based on exposure to toxicity- the more toxic, the deeper. It is about transforming a numerical system of flight paths into a tabulation of different levels of toxic intensities. The technique of indexing toxic accumulation with the territorial reconfiguration of the landscape effectively thinks about land form in the double meaning of memorial and remediation.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 The levels go from overground, to underground, to overwater, to underwater. With the knowledge produced in the labs, each of levels are used for cultivation of different species, mostly related to the Vietnamese diet and ideas of bioaccumulation. Habitats of different species are designed with different landscape techniques and materiality.

The higher regions are used for agricultural crops such as coconut, cashew nuts, coffee, black peppercorn, rubber, rice paddy, and livestock. The water species include freshwater mussels, clams, giant prawn, tropical rock lobster, sweet snail, and basa fish.

Underground species include insects and soil microbes.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 The land form is created by bulldozing existing landscapes, churning defoliated trees, soil, and deep soil into a malleable mixture.

The edges of each land form are sawed, revealing sections of trees, biomass and decomposing leaves. A concrete retaining wall is built in front to maintain the militarist geometry, its geometry is consisted of program boxes structured in concrete.

Through the architectural language of notching, different jenga blocks of different programs and dimensions are fit together to form the compact retaining wall. In the following diagrams, different programmatic blocks are pulled apart to understand their role in the system.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 The overground block consists of terraced agricultural fields, through remediated soil new agricultural species are cultivated and monitored of their dioxin content. Livestock feed on those crops, which simulates a remediated food chain.The underwater block consists of water channels with filters, that regulate water flows from a higher grid to a lower grid. Sediment flows are studied through core sampling, and monitored inside glass cisterns. The underground section uses similar protrusions into and out of the building to examine surfaces of deep soil.

Different remediation techniques of soil as well as its living species are tested on-site.

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CULTURE AGENTS ORANGE/ 20 The vertical standing blocks are circulation pathways where visitors are allowed into the building. The horizontal blocks are programmatic, namely the agriculture unit exposed to air, soil unit facing underground, water unit half-submerged in water.

The building is not only a testing ground but an object of display and spectacle. The glass encased circulation pathway for visitors and tourists are curated to expose the experimentation process of dioxin remediation.

The corridor also contains a visitor’s center, educational programs, restaurants and living quarters.

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CRITIC: MABEL WILSON AND JORDAN CARVER COLLABORATORS: LUCY NAVARRO, ALEX WONG YEAR: FALL 2019 BRIEF: MASTERPLAN PROPOSAL TO RETHINK THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FLOODING AND HISTORICAL LEGACY OF RED-LINING AWARD: RUNNER-UP PARIS BUELL PRIZE 2020

GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19

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East Harlem, a historically redlined neighborhood has many legacies of the once rampant policies of segregation and racial discrimination seen such as environmental toxicity and the proliferation of fast food restaurants.The project addresses and mediates the environmental crisis of flooding by allowing housing to flood via new infrastructure. Cultural and institutional retrofitting and transformations leverage people, buildings, vacant lots and infrastructures in the historically deprived neighborhood of East Harlem. Greenlining creates opportunities and new modes of sustainability, healthier lifestyles, and new housing construction.

It employs the impending environmental disaster of flooding as a trigger to accelerate social, economic and cultural-political 23 changes in a neighborhood.

GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19

Reference to Amanda Williams’s color(ed) theory

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Violence of the line in redlining, felt not just on aerial view (understanding mortgage rates and property prices on maps), but locally on human scale, streets lined with fast food chains, predatory financial operations e.g. check-cashing; the district is Representative of the legacies caused by racial segregation and redlining- still felt today with fast food proliferations, higher-than-average construction frequencies, high air and water pollution rates, low wealth accumulation percentages of local residents, all sources of toxicity in both environment and culture.

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GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19 Red zone communities have become or was previously waste treatments centers, brownfields and superfund sites. These places of toxicity have developed alongside low income neighborhoods, predominantly black, latinx and immigrant communities such as Astoria, Harlem, South Bronx, and the Gowanus canal.

Presently, East Harlem contains the highest geographical concentration of public housing projects in the United States. In comparison with the rest of Manhattan and NYC, is a predominantly low-income, working class minority community, with higher than average unemployment and poverty rates.

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GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19 The construction industry is a major source of pollution, responsible for around 4% of particulate emissions. These construction sites generate high levels of dust (typically from concrete, cement, wood, stone and silica. These pollutants can carry for large distances over a long period of time.

Building construction is a common site in this neighborhood often accompanied by obtrusive scaffolding, dumpsters and large freight vehicles all contributing to unhealthy air quality. Road construction is the cause of many types of pollution. From the chemicals that are typically used to maintain our infrastructure as well as light pollution and noise pollution due to the use of heavy machinery.

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GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19

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Although research has shown that there is no direct correlation between income and frequency of visiting fast food restaurants, it can be observed that more fast food is found in Harlem than in Upper East Side. We can still make assumptions that fast food is more affordable. Figures also show that fast food advertising is targeted more towards African Americans. If we view fast food as deepfried-ness, use of saturated fat, processed sugar- and fat-laden food and low-par ingredients, then it can also be viewed as a carcinogen, a toxin that asymmetrically impact colored populations. It also alludes to the concept of a food desert, an area geographically challenged to access affordable and nutritious food, which is in comparison to a food oasis.

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GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19 The new border situated between 127th and 97th street. There is a hard Border along 3rd avenue, 2nd avenue, and 1st avenue, where there is a soft border connecting the basements of neighboring NYCHA housing including Thomas Jefferson houses tenants, George Washington houses, Carver Houses. The Environmental Protection Agency and the federal government demarcates this new bordered zone as a priority zone, where the flooding risk is assessed as high within the next 80 years. Local residents earn a higher order in the queue for relocation applications. There will be renewed concerns for reorganization, and soon a densification of the edge, coupled by technocratic infrastructure to divert flooding.

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GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19 Redlining was not only a culprit of historical segregation but to this day creates new forms of gentrification. Gentrifiers, attracted by the low land rates, come in as redevelopment plans such as the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan- avenues are densified by rezoning.

Environmental disasters such as flooding as an opportunity is introduced as an equalizing agent that affects both gentrifiers and low-income housing indiscriminately. The specificity of the historical and geographical conditions in east harlem allow for new found reconciliations between environmental and social solutions 34

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New Washington Houses infill

Water Systems

Earth berms Water channels

GREEN-LINING HARLEM/ 19 Thinking at the scale of infrastructure is crucial for matching efforts to the scale of the crisis itself. But infrastructure is not just physical. We build a social infrastructure parallel to stormwater management and coastal protection systems. The proposed system not only shields the city against floods and stormwater; it provides social and environmental benefits to the community, an improved public realm. We rethink infrastructure as an amenity. Which grants us the opportunity to utilize the power of the city and strength of community in making these large scale changes. All the while preventing developers from utilizing NYCHA land as infill in redevelopment schemes which bring adverse gentrification to the neighborhood.

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CRITIC: VIOLET WHITNEY COLLABORATORS: GAURI BAHUGUNA , JAMES PIACENTINI, ADAM SUSANECK, ALEX WONG YEAR: FALL 2019 BRIEF: UNITY AND C# PROGRAMMING TO CREATE INTERACTIVE GAME TO SIMULATE FLOODING AND MEDIATION STRATEGIES

STATION INUNDATION/ 19 The Big U by Bjarke Ingels, Oyster-tecture

by SCAPE, Floodgates surrounding subway stations by the MTA, are some of the individuals’ and the city’s effort to curb the damages of subway from flooding and rising sea levels.

Our project uses Unity and Mapbox to simulate the effects of different events of flooding to the subway stations, and make reference to flood remediation strategies from individuals and city oarganizations, on the effectiveness against rising water levels.

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STATION INUNDATION/ 19

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CRITIC: LINDY ROY YEAR: SPRING 2019 BRIEF: EDUCATION INSTITUTE IN NEWBURGH OF THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY

CITY FARM/ 19 This project is a reaction against industrialized, commodified ways to think about landscaping, farming, and food-making. This project seeks to redefine the relationship between humans and the rest of the environment. Humans cease to be extracting from the environment- apple is not only sweet, a tulip is not only beautiful, a dog is not only a pet, a bee is not only honey.

The project draws from the theory of affordance by JJ Gibson from the mid 20th century. The noun affordance pertains to the environment providing the opportunity for action. Through urbanization, the environment is changing into more cities like Newburgh.

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CITY FARM/ 19 Greywater is drained from neighboring buildings, and flow along the cascading landscape and get distributed to different uses. At the start, water is used to irrigate crops. As the greywater flows through the Living Machine on its main axis, water can be drank by the animals and even humans. Food waste collectors are located on the tip of main streets such as Broadway, where residents will pass by and pour into them. The food waste feeds the animals, and through composting, replenishes the nutrients in the plant soil. Recycled plastic is used to manufacture the PVC tubes for planting.

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CITY FARM/ 19 The surface is the membrane or interface that separates between substance and medium, such as the surface tension of a water droplet, the riverbed, or the dissolving edge of a sugar molecule. The surface invites light to be reflected or absorbed, at the same time allows animals and animate objects to interact with it. This project thinks about the surfaces it creates as it mediates between water that travels inside pipes, the substance of plants or crops, and air that carries the visual perception, smell, and sound. It utilizes geothermal energy, greywater and other technologies that carry through in pipes the energy, the resources and the substances throughout the system.

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CITY FARM/ 19 Through this project, I try to design the ground and the activities above it, and the space between the natural and fabricated ground. Gibson identifies that affordance does not only depend on the way environment is designed, but on people’s abilities and thus on patterns of activity that are cultivated by sociocultural practices. The theory of affordance establishes a sociomaterial environment that helps us reimagine human’s relationship with the ground, with other animals and species in the environment that is antithetic to norms.

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CITY FARM/ 19 The underside are these urban rooms, where humans can reside, rest, or spend time on hammocks and other urban furniture or simply the ground. Through thinking about the ground or soil as the ubiquitous surface, I studied what it affords humans, children, and animals. In animal behavioral studies, the pig has different postures of sleeping as the surrounding temperature changes. Goats climb up and under in these goat playgrounds.

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CITY FARM/ 19 JJ Gibson, an American psychologist and author of Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, talks about the inseparable natural and artificial world. In fact, rice has already been cultivated along the Yangtze River in 4000 BCE, measures such as crop rotation, selective breeding, agriculture and genetic preservation have already blurred the distinctions between the natural and the artificial. Corn, cotton, rice, and vegetable crops have been modified to increase yield, be resistant to pests, pathogens, and natural disasters. Closer to the 20th century, gene-cutting , X-ray irradiation are among biotech processes to speed up the process of a human-centric mutation in the plant’s DNA. 52

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CITY FARM/ 19 Artists such as Alexis Rockman, who is from the Hudson River Valley, as well as Center for Postnatural history in Pittsburgh, are among individuals and organizations thinking about the Anthropocene epoch, and the Postnatural history, if it is ever disconnected from the natural history. Artists such as Kathryn Fleming, image a Zoo of the Future, where new species are designed and fabricated that are more suited to the changing environment.

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CRITIC: HILARY SAMPLE COLLABORATORS: NINGXIN HUANG, ALEX WONG YEAR: FALL 2018 BRIEF: HOUSING STUDIO BASED IN THE BRONX, NEW YORK CITY, CENTERING AROUND BUILDING MAINTENANCE AWARDS: JOHN A. NOTARO MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP 2018, VECTORWORKS DESIGN SCHOLARSHIP 2019

COLLAGE CITY/ 18 According to Forbes, the average American woman today owns 30 outfits, compared to eight in the 1930s. In a book titled Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors by a team of UCLA archeologists, middle-class, California-based families are analyzed to find out that the American household is filled with clutter in different domestic settings treated with little care. The contemporary home immediately calls for a system that addresses issues of storing and managing stuff. Trends such as fast fashion, constantly renewed electronic gadgets and accessories, and frozen food are sources of clutter in every room of an apartment.

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18 The project also takes a critical look at New York City’s past in perimeter block and courtyard housing. By reviewing A history of housing in New York City by Richard Plunz, our team is interested in how perimeter blocks boast high density in housing people in land-scarce environments such as NYC, while throughout history, different courtyard proportions are experimented from historic tenement blocks with narrow air shafts, to Ernest Flagg-type Parisian-inspired courtyards, to luxurious Astor-developed courtyard buildings, to contemporary interpretations such as the VIA 57 West by BIG and Mercedes House by TEN Arquitectos.

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18 While courtyards have earned a unique flair as NYC’s housing solution, allowing for natural light and cross ventilation into each flat as a passive strategy to reduce the energy cost seems to be a recurring theme in the city’s residential endeavors. The Collage City reflects on those precedents, to aggregate different dimensions and heights of courtyards, thus creating different scales of micro-neighborhoods where residents would share objects and experiences.

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18

1’:1/55�

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The Collage City is a housing project that introduces 3Rs (Reduce, Recycle and Reuse) to its inhabitants and its neighborhood.

It is a critique and response to the American hyper-consumerism that give rise to problems of unsustainability such as material consumption, material excess, exploitation of material and labor, waste disposal and incineration. By thinking about the Bronx site as a venue for possibilities, used toys and books can be repurposed from surrounding schools, as well as out-fashioned electronics, clothing, and furniture from NYCHA blocks.

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Isometric vignettes in 1”: 10’ Used clothes Used clothes

Thrift shop Thrift shop

NYCHA residences NYCHA residences

Old textbooks Old textbooks

Library/ Second hand Library/ Second hand

B B

Used clothes Used electronics Used clothes Used electronics

Thrift shop Pawn shop Thrift shop Pawn shop

NYCHA residences E-waste reuse NYCHA residences E-waste reuse

Used furniture Used furniture

Neighboring schools Neighboring schools

Material reuse Material reuse

Artists/ craftsmen Artists/ craftsmen

D D

Old textbooks Organic waste Old textbooks Organic waste

Library/ Second hand Fertiliser Library/ Second hand Fertiliser

Used furniture Donated food Used furniture Donated food

Neighboring schools On-site farm Neighboring schools On-site farm

B H B H

C C

Material reuse Food bankreuse Material Food bank

I I

Isometric vignettes in 1”: 10’ Isometric vignettes in 1”: 10’

Artists/ craftsmen Community kitchen Artists/ craftsmen Community kitchen

D A D A

C F C F

I IG G

COLLAGE CITY/ 18 Used electronics Used electronics

Pawn shop Pawn shop

Organic waste Organic waste

E-waste reuse E-waste reuse

H H

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Fertiliser Fertiliser

On-site farm On-site farm

Donated food Donated food

A A

Food bank Food bank

Community kitchen Community kitchen

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G G

The project tackles how owning and getting rid of stuff can enhance public spaces on the ground level. People can aggregate in courtyards in special occasions of bazaars, flea markets, and engage in ceremonies of exchange, purchase, and donations, to honor those materials into better uses. Neighbors from surrounding real estates can also participate, enlarging the social and material loop or economy to celebrate these objects.

The intervention thus transforms from a community to a metropolitan scale, where the architecture becomes an absorber and attraction for people in the vicinity who believe in new ways to engage with diversity, sustainability and equity.

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Circulation floor terrace rendering

COLLAGE CITY/ 18

1’:1/67�

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The Collage City introduces programs such as food banks, community kitchen, thrift shops, second-hand book stores, and farming that systematizes a flow of resources and materials both within the project and within the district. The courtyards of different shapes and sizes resulted by architecture are public spaces that contain civic programs such as not only ball courts, swimming pool, and recreational amenities, but transparent laundry pods and garbage facilities. These interventions become the temporary storage space for abandoned household items and furniture pieces, and display them in attracting opportunities for a second life.

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Apartment Interior rendering

COLLAGE CITY/ 18

1’:1/67�

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The project tackles how owning and getting rid of stuff can enhance public spaces on the ground level. People can aggregate in courtyards in special occasions of bazaars, flea markets, and engage in ceremonies of exchange, purchase, and donations, to honor those materials into better uses. The process of interaction becomes beginnings of conversations between families from different demographic and cultural backgrounds and lifestyles.

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18 Spines consisting of cabinets and shafts face the courtyards, with trash and laundry chutes that are directed into the courtyards.

This project aims to create these pools of material goods and labor that answers also issues of maintenance. This project aims to create these pools of material goods and labor that answers also issues of maintenance.

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18

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COLLAGE CITY/ 18

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CRITIC: DANIL NAGY YEAR: SPRING 2019 BRIEF: GENERATIVE DESIGN ELECTIVE TO OPTIMIZE SOLAR PERFORMANCE FOR HOUSING MASSING

Performance Metrics

GENERATIVE DESIGN/ 18 This research singles out on the cascading form surrounding the central courtyard, popularized by BIG’s projects such as Mountain Dwelling and the 8 House with JDS. The higher the massing, the less light that can enter the units. What is an optimal form that could maximize the daylighting for the housing units, while maximizing the urban density value? This piece of design research is built with the help of the Rhino 3D modelling platform, Grasshopper, Python, and a Python plug-in called Discover developed by Professor Danil Nagy. I use it to research on a design space model under the context of New York City and its street grid originating from the 1811 Commissioner’s plan.

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x axis shows number of units generated in the housing mass, y axis shows average solar intake of units annually, measured in kWh.

50 generations of design optimization

GENERATIVE DESIGN/ 18 The first simulation is modelled from the footprint of VIA 57 West at Upper West Side, with existing neighbouring blocks inputted as context geometry for the ladybug simulation. As seen on the chart of design solutions, three designs were identified from the pareto front, each displaying varying preferences in the two input parameters. However, all three designs display the tendency to lower down on the south-facing facade, a logical attribute to New York City’s location on the Northern Hemisphere. The results are also dissimilar to VIA’s chosen design, which was thought of as more iconic-looking and compromised on its daylighting performances.

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CRITIC: MIMI HOANG FALL: SPRING 2018 BRIEF: ALONE TOGETHER IS A PROVOCATION TO CONSIDER THE FORM AND CONTENT OF THE LIBRARY THAT IS BASED IN THE DUMBO DISTRICT OF NEW YORK CITY

LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18 The Library of Events uses light and shadow to allow events to happen throughout the day and the year. The library consists of tilted walls and split levels that houses different programs in different spaces. The theme of Alone Together is articulated as light and shadows becomes a visual divider of spaces.

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Early geometric explorations

LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18 This is a library for artists, writers, freelancers, architects and film producers. It stimulates inhabitants in their creative processes with the dynamic light and shadow conditions. The alternating illuminated and shaded effect along its section allows the travel of the mind. The conditions of walls maximize northern sun and minimize southern sun.

First Floor 86

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LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18

Second Floor

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Third Floor

Forth Floor

Walls are tilted in different angles to respond to different daylighting moments e.g. the high southern sun and the low eastern/western sun. Modules are aggregated in different scales, appropriated along the slope of site.

The split levels floor and horizontal floor alternates. The lateral movement through the building is always a gradient of contraction/ expansion of spaces. The vertical movement consists of a main circulation space that bypasses some specific programs.

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LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18 The introduction of skylight is an urban strategy that responds to the density of tall buildings in New York City. Through the skylight, daylighting has a high probability to reach depths of the building than side openings.

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LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18 This is a library of surfaces. The surface is articulated in terms of orientation, slope and materiality. The duality of the two planes of one surface is articulated. The effect of daylighting is imitated and played with artificial light. Lit surfaces express a form of importance to the program or to the spatiality, which is different throughout the day and year.

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LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18 As a result, top floors are brightly lit- the reading program is defined by shade. The lower floors are dimly lit- the public program is defined by light. The theme of Alone Together is articulated, as light and shadow becomes a visual divider of spaces. People are organized in large spaces by slits of light and shapes of shadows- the temporal contrast is regulated by the static artificial light.

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LIBRARY OF EVENTS/ 18 The crossing between daylighting and artificial lighting is calibrated. The intersection is when dynamic meets the permanent. The stitching of nature and artificial is a concept of the interior design.

These strategies have created a willfully porous building and experience that combines opacity and void and then overlays it with shadow and light, thus creating a kind of infinity. Once beyond the fear it will be a very creative place.

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CRITIC: JOSH UHL YEAR: FALL 2017 BRIEF: ON- DESIGN A TRANSIENT SPACE FOR LOST AND FOUND OBJECTS, A DATABASE AND PORTAL CONNECTED TO THE NEW L TRAIN STATION AT 14TH STREET AND AVENUE A.

DIAGONAL LOOP/ 17 The loop is a project that designs the journey of passage from underground plane to ground plane. The loop is a mix between the lost and found department and flea market typologies. The two typologies are interlocked to one another. The form originates from one single folded plane- parts of the plane is lifted up and down tocreate a dynamic journey above and below ground. The whole project also to act like a light filter as one descends into the underground light trickles down.

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1. PROGRAMMATIC STRATEGY

2. TECTONIC STRATEGY

3. CIRCULATION STRATEGY

UP

neighbouring buildings UP DN UP UP

E. 1 4

UP

DN

UP

UP

St

sub wa y

folding from one plane

pla tfo rm

lost & found

4. MASSING STRATEGY

5. SECTIONAL STRATEGY

6. OCCUPY STRATEGY

person leaves subway at intersection between stair and ground plane

storeroom massing

light enters underground

storeroom

pathway circulation

glass shopwindow storeroom slab

L

M

S

claiming/buying

S

M

S S

exchange

DIAGONAL LOOP/ 17

ground excavation

open tread

Another concept of the project is that people are organized like items are. The breaking of the slope into stairs of different scales allow items to be organized in terms of size, and people events to be organized in terms of social scale. The breaking of stairs coincide with the breaking of the ground mass surrounding it. The soft edge of the project allows it to act like a truely urban one.

close tread light enters underground

new

storeroom slab ground mass

visibility- stairs 100

old lost object distribution

column- centre of mass 101

DIAGONAL LOOP/ 17

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CRITIC: JOSH UHL YEAR: FALL 2017 BRIEF: CREATE A WATERFRONT STRUCTURE, AS AN AUGMENTATION OF THE CITY’S SURFACE, IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE A DYNAMIC LANDSCAPE, CITYSCAPE, AND BUILDING INTERFACE THAT ENGAGES THE EAST RIVER AND PLANS FOR FUTURE CITY RHYTHMS.

1:1750 roof plan

1:1750 floor plan

HORIZONTAL LOOP/ 17 The park has an alienated relationship with river. Water is engaged only visually by pedestrians. In addition, the park is dissociated with the rest of the city, only made accessible through sparsely situated pedestrian flyovers. My proposal is situated between two, such that it directly replaces that segment of promenade. In place of it, a dynamic biking and running pier is created that endows a far more interesting spatial experience from one point to another. interact with the water, the ground and the air.

1:1750 front elevation

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HORIZONTAL LOOP/ 17 My proposal is to create a soft edge between water and land, through creating three programmatic strips containing a pier, a bicycle trail and a running track. The straight, horizontal pier is looped in between maneuvering strips that enter the underground, overground, underwater and overwater. A restaurant and amphitheater are slotted in the courtyards (residual spaces). The focus is on the cross section, creating moments where people would physically, visually and sensually

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CRITIC: JOSH UHL SCHOOL: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY GSAPP BRIEF: ABOVE- DESIGN A CRITICAL CORNER, A QUARTER OF AN URBAN INTER-SECTION, NOT AS THE MEETING OF TWO PLANES, OR ELEVATIONS BUT AS AN ACTIVE, HABITABLE FACE, REINTERPRETING AND OVERLAYING PATTERNS OF ANALYSIS

Circulation - Facade In a maze like diagonal circulation network, stairways become the divider of facade, pocket spaces are created as a result.

Circulation - Facade In a maze like diagonal circulation network, stairways become the divider of facade, pocket spaces are created as a result.

Speed - Skin The facade patterns are designed to accomodate the 3 different spaces resulting in 3 speeds flowing through the systems.

Unit 1 Intermediate slope induces residual program, glazing pushed back to form outdoor space, full height fritted glass strips to obscure disgraceful activities.

Circulation - Facade In a maze like diagonal circulation network, stairways become the divider of facade, pocket spaces are created as a result.

Speed - Skin The facade patterns are designed to accomodate the 3 different spaces resulting in 3 speeds flowing through the systems.

Transparency - Openess The journey through the facade is one that weaves between indoors and outdoors, horizontal and vertical, opened and clsoed.

VERTICAL LOOP/ 17

Unit 1 Intermediate slope induces residual program, glazing pushed back to form outdoor space, full height fritted glass strips to obscure disgraceful activities.

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This is a faรงade project that is inspired by the fire staircases of New York City. It is a design that mediates the interface between city and building, and creates a journey for both pedestrians and users to travel along the boundary of architecture. By multiplying the stair element, a hexagonal honeycomb is weaved out of a network Unit of 2 stairs connecting both horizontally vertically.

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CRITIC: STEPHAN POTTS, MICHELLE ROELOFS, NIALL COOPER, MICHELE BUSIRI-VICI COLLABORATORS: DALTON BAKER, PETER STOLL, DANLI WANG, ALEX WONG YEAR: FALL 2018 BRIEF: GREENPOINT THEATRE CONSTRUCTION DRAWINGS

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GREENPOINT THEATRE/ 18 Greenpoint theatre is a multi-purpose theatre located in Greenpoint, DUMBO Brooklyn, which was inspired by the industrial vernacular vibe of the district. Its facade consists of terra cotta baguettes, a metal wire mesh, and diagonal structural frame, and various practical elements.

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CRITIC: EARL JACKSON, ANNE SHELLUM, TOM JOST, EMORY GRACE LEE COLLABORATORS: YIXUAN CHENG, ALEX LI, ALEX WONG, QINGYING WANG YEAR: SPRING 2019 BRIEF: CAMPUS DESIGN IN DOWNTOWN NEWARK

TECH + ART STREET/ 19 Our proposed project is a Tech and Art Street that anchors between two professional institutions of innovative technology and art coupled with a residential complex with commercial center. Along the street, there will be live/work units that allow the students and recent graduates around to live and work at the same place, turning the site into a 24/7 community. The workshops on the ground floor act as retail and gallery spaces that the young entrepreneurs could sell their innovative products, and they could live and work on the upstairs.

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TECH + ART STREET/ 19 Mobility strategies will be employed to address the current obstacle created by Macarter Highway and to increase the urban activities of the site by turing the site into pedestrian-only, with a water-front park where outdoor tech and art festivals could be held.

Water and Energy Strategies are developed along with the millennial mindset to create a sharing economy, reducing the overall water and energy demand.

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TECH + ART STREET/ 19 Mobility strategies will be employed to address the current obstacle created by Macarter Highway and to increase the urban activities of the site by turing the site into pedestrian-only, with a water-front park where outdoor tech and art festivals could be held.

Water and Energy Strategies are developed along with the millennial mindset to create a sharing economy, reducing the overall water and energy demand.

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TECH + ART STREET/ 19 This project aims to create a community of young entrepreneurs in the art and tech industries by connecting the underused land of downtown waterfront to its surrounding existing networks of artists and tech startups. Newark demonstrates a great possibility of serving as a place for the exchange of ideas and initiatives in both arts and science with its rich technological, artistic and educational resources radiating from the downtown area. It houses three higher educational institutions, numerous museums and art galleries, as well as the headquarters of Panasonic and Audible who are now venturing into funding young technology initiatives across the Newark area.

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CRITIC: DAVID EUGIN MOON YEAR: SPRING 2020 BRIEF: RESEARCH PROJECT THAT TRACES ARCHITECTURE OF MIGRANTS AND DIASPORA OF HONG KONG COMMUNITIES FOLLOWING HONG KONG PROTESTS 2019

HOUSING MIGRANTS AND THE DIASPORA/ 19 As much as a diasporic city of Hong Kong is inspired by the recent 2019 Anti-ELAB protests, it can be equally inspired by Hong Kongâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unique history of migration and emigration. This project, that theorizes the architecture of a charter city for emigrates from Hong Kong, starts with integrating the flows of people in and out of Hong Kong, two of which are often examined separately, from and between Mainland China as well as faraway constituents such as Vancouver and Toronto of Canada, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles of the US, and Sydney and Melbourne of Australia.

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HOUSING MIGRANTS AND THE DIASPORA/ 19 What is particularly noteworthy is the emigrates’ aspiration of leaving the home in Hong Kong in hopes of a more prospective future for themselves and their offspring, with reasons ranging from “too much political dispute or social cleavage” and the lack of democracy, to overcrowding living conditions and air pollution.This paper registers the Hong Kong people in the act of emigration, where mostly “middle-class” and above demographics exercise their geographical and cultural mobility afforded to them by wealth both literally and of knowledge and skillset to seek alternatives to the seemingly unsurmountable local reality.

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CRITIC: FELICITY SCOTT YEAR: FALL 2019 BRIEF: ARCHITECTUARE + HUMAN RIGHTS TITLE: RENOVATION BY HONG KONG PROTESTERS AS COUNTER-ARCHITECTS

Introduction Since June of 2019, a large-scale protest has arisen in Hong Kong against the legislation of a bill to extradite criminal fugitives from Hong Kong to Mainland China. It has turned into a pro-democracy movement. Hong Kong protesters are involved in architectural modifications they dub ‘renovation,’ in order to pressurize the Hong Kong government and Central Government of Beijing to respond to their “five key demands.” [1] The protesters deploy techniques of vandalism and destruction on companies that are linked to the Chinese regime, including but not limited to China-funded banks, China-owned publishing houses, pro-China caterers and restaurants, pro-Beijing lawmakers’ offices, surveillance lampposts, the Mass Transit Railway, the airport, university campuses, and the Legislative Council. This article aims to theorize how Hong Kong protesters use architecture as a vehicle of protest.

This essay opens with definitions of key terms. It then focuses on three key protest sites, namely the Legislative Council Complex (July 1st), the Mass Transit Railway (late August onwards), and Beijing-friendly shops, Chinese banks and ATMs (September onwards). The essay concludes by generating links between these examples and beyond. Through these disparate but interconnected examples, the essay looks at the tools and tactics of destruction, aiming to answer questions of iconoclasm, violence, protest and warfare, and aesthetics of destruction.

Counter-architects The first analogy of Hong Kong protesters as architects can be traced to the 2014 Umbrella Revolution, during which protesters occupied thoroughfares with living camps. According to “architect and curator” Adam Bobbette, the protest camps in Hong Kong are comparable to Istanbul’s Gezi Park (2012) and Resurrection City in Washington DC (1968) as “counter-cities within the city.” [2] Instead of perceiving protesters as only dismantling architecture and systems, Feigenbaum and Bobbette make the case that protesters are simultaneously engaging in construction of the tools of “protest, leisure, worship, and infrastructures.” [3] This essay seeks to elaborate on their perspectives, while taking into account that the Hong Kong protesters have, between 2014 and today, shifted from ‘occupying’ architecture to ‘renovat130

ing’ it (both of which are tactics of architectural modification).

architects of the city, are their own best clients.

The further definition as ‘counter-architects’ is borrowed from “counter forensics.” The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London describes Weizman’s Forensic Architecture as “a civil practice that seeks to invert the institutionalized forensic gaze, with individuals and organizations taking over the means of evidence production, and turning the state’s means against the violence it commits.” [4] Hong Kong protesters, defined as ‘counter-architects,’ embody a bottom-up practice that reverses institutionalized architecture—through modifications of its appearance, function, or memory—to allow it the ability to undo its own doings.

in 2047 (when Sino-British Joint Declaration expires). Since the 1997 handover, the building has been seen by protesters as supporting an increasingly China-encroached regime and, therefore, an active site where political or structural violence takes place. Significant historical examples to illustrate the encroachment include the Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23 anti-subversion legislation in 2003, the Moral and National Education school curriculum proposal in 2012, Hong Kong Legislative Council oath-taking controversy in 2016 (leading to the disqualification of members-elected localist LegCo candidates), the National Anthem Bill in 2019, and the extradition bill in 2019.

Renovation The definition of renovation is strongly tied with that of counter-architects. The term, first used sarcastically by protesters, is code for “trashing the store.” A milder action is ‘decoration,’ which means “spray-painting slogans” [5] (Fig. 1). However, both renovation and decoration can be read with a more theoretical backdrop in mind, especially in relation to Michele Feher’s editorial note in Nongovernmental Politics [6], where he maps out how nongovernmental activism can be perceived as “motives,” “ways,” “sites,” and “design.” The “motive” of each renovation act may differ slightly between individual protesters. But collectively, they aim at identifying an architectural failure in reconciling the diagram and realized use of the architecture, or revealing a purposeful disguise of the former using the latter. Thus, renovation is a “way” that protesters modify, fix, and repair, exerting changes to the material and/or operational nature of architecture, so that its operation is matched with the public’s expectations of it. Through identifying “sites” of contestations and carrying out “designs” in the form of graffiti or destruction, the renovation act resembles that of an architect approaching a client brief.

It can also be indicated that renovation is a highly personalized act; where an old owner may dismiss the need to renovate, a new tenant may see the need to do so. The need is subjective and highly disputed, entirely dependent on the perspective of the beholder. This essay defines the protesters’ personalized renovations as well-informed by their perceptive knowledge of the city and its invisible systems and asserts that they, as users and

Gramho / Instagram (Fig. 1): A four-tier color categorization system to identify targets for renovation

Legislative Council Complex The Legislative Council Complex (LegCo Complex), headquarters of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, has always been a symbol of state power: initially of the colonial state, and currently of the Hong Kong government and Central Government. The current LegCo Complex was built between 2008 and 2011, replacing the neoclassical-colonial LegCo building that was the Former Supreme Court Building. Although the architecture of the current LegCo is not colonial, the establishment was largely a post-colonial one, with many elements of the legislature inherited during British rule. [7] Even after the handover in 1997, the legal colonial legacies are viewed with skepticism by critics. The Emergency Regulations Ordinance is one example of such a legacy. It was last evoked during the Communist-supported 1967 riots, and was appropriated in October 2019 to ban the wearing of masks. [8] The ban was subsequently ruled by the High Court as “incompatible with the Basic Law.” [9] The legislative process in Hong Kong, which inherited many colonial influences, was neither guaranteed full autonomy from higher powers nor reformed after the handover.

As the public engine for law-making, the LegCo Council (or at least the Former Supreme Court Building) has been a backdrop to laws that protesters believe to be oppositional to the pro-democracy agenda and to legislation preparing for reintegration with the China authoritarian regime

毛毛孩/ Youtube (Fig.2)

The imagery of Fig. 2 is drawn from political satirist cartoons of 2003, when Regina Ip Lau Sukyee served as Secretary for Security to codify the Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23. [10] The bottom imagery was largely circulated during the time, to characterize Ip’s contemptuous attitude towards pro-democracy law-makers who challenged her, as she sat behind the signature wood-paneled walls of the former LegCo building. The top imagery shows how the cartoonist reworked the ubiquitous imagery to reproduce the two protagonists in the scene: Ip and the LegCo architecture. The LegCo Complex remains central to narratives of political oppression, including in the 2019 protests. The backdrop of the antechamber is as synonymous with structural violence as the figures who occupy that space.

Historian and architect Andrew Herscher’s Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict [11] defines architecture as a “surrogate for the agencies deemed responsible

for the violence to be avenged,” thus becoming themselves bearers of counter-violence. Herscher cautioned against such a definition in the case of NATO’s bombing during Kosovo conflict, appealing that architecture, unlike its limited definition set out by the discourse of modernism, has more “individual and collective,” “social,” “affective,” and “cultural investments.” [12] Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss makes a similar case in his essay, “NATO as Architectural Critic,” for the cultural significance of those bombed architecture. [13] However, this ‘sympathy’ for architecture may not be extended to the LegCo building, as the establishment it surrogates (the Legislative Council) suffers from “a failure in representation.” [14] As a result, it is almost always flagged only by a misrepresentation of the people’s will in the media instead of being a good representation of it. The association of a place with good memories is argued by Herscher and Weiss as a key point of departure in criticizing NATO’s bombing of it.

On July 1st, the protesters broke into the LegCo complex. They “smashed their way into the building and swarmed inside, damaging fixtures and equipment, tearing down portraits, spray-painting slogans and graffiti, and occupying the chambers for a short time.” [15] Viola Zhou of Inkstone identified five key messages protesters left behind after the occupation: 1) “a blackened emblem”; 2) “a torn-apart mini-constitution”; 3) the British Hong Kong flag; 4) defaced portraits of former LegCo presidents; and 5) vandalized slogans to call for the release of Edward Leung, a pro-independence figure jailed for “rioting and assaulting police.” [16] They blackened out “People’s Republic of China,” but left “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” untouched. They defaced portraits of Pro-Beijing lawmakers. They raised the colonial flag in that space. Through the aforementioned actions, protesters brought new cultural artefacts into the legislative space that reflect their aspirations for it. They rewrote the imperfect election system that had failed them with this destruction, believing it to act as an alternative method to cast votes or get their voices heard.

Figures like Thomas Stubblefield, especially in “Iconoclasm beyond Negation: Globalization and Image Production in Mosul,” would support that the renovation done to the LegCo council was no less than a photo-op and an operation of image production. He describes “the significance of these sites solely in terms of their destruction,”

[1] The Editors, “What are the Five Key Demands of Hong Kong?” supchina, October 23, 2019, https://supchina. com/2019/10/23/what-are-the-five-key-demands-of-hongkong/.

[2] Qtd. In Anna Feigenbaum, “Occupy architecture,” ICON, February 4, 2015, https://www.iconeye.com/architecture/ features/item/11741-occupy-architecture.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Counter Forensics,” The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, accessed December 22, 2019, https://www.ica. art/counter-forensics.

[5] Kris Cheng, “Explainer: ‘Renovation’, ‘decoration’ and ‘fire magic’ – the businesses targeted by Hong Kong’s hit-and-run protesters,” Hong Kong Free Press, October 9, 2019, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/10/09/explainer-renovation-decoration-fire-magic-businesses-targeted-hong-kongs-hit-run-protesters/.

[6] Michel Feher, Nongovernmental Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 12-27.

[7] Chan Ming, “The Legacy of the British Administration of Hong Kong: A View from Hong Kong,” The China Quarterly, no. 151 (Sep., 1997), 567-582.

[8] Ilaria Maria Sala, “Hong Kong is turning to a 1922 law that was used to quell a seamen’s strike to ban face masks,” QZ, October 4, 2019, https://qz.com/1721951/ anti-mask-law-the-1922-origins-of-hong-kongs-emergencypowers/.

[9] Jasmine Siu, “Anti-mask law to quell Hong Kong protests ruled unconstitutional by High Court,” South China Morning Post, November 18, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/politics/article/3038184/anti-mask-lawquell-hong-kong-protests-ruled.

[10] “【行政長官跑馬仔：葉劉淑儀】回顧孽瘤2003年 23條立法嘴臉 1” YouTube video, 1:11, 1:39. “毛毛孩,” Feburary 8, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubvCa1MUskM. [11] Andrew Herscher, Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 99-120.

[12] Ibid., 115.

[13] Srjdan Jovanovic Weiss, “NATO as architectural critic,” eds. Markus Miessen and Yann Chateigné, in The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012) [14] Robert Gooden, “The Pulse: Global protests in 2019: discussion with Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman & the HK conte,” interview by RTHK, RTHK, Youtube, December 21, 2019, audio, 13:19, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ThCkcbqsN7E [15] Alan Taylor, “Photos: Hong Kong Protesters Break into Legislative Council Building,” The Atlantic, July 2, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2019/07/ hong-kong-protesters-break-into-legislative-council-building-photos/593158/.

[16] Viola Zhou, “A flag of British Hong Kong, and other protest messages decoded,” Inkstone, July 2, 2019, https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/hong-kong-protests-why-activists-put-british-colonial-flag-legislative-council/article/3016908.

RENOVATION BY HONG KONG PROTESTERS AS COUNTER-ARCHITECTS/ 19

Sum Lok-kei/ South China Morning Post (Fig. 3)

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Alvin Lum/ South China Morning Post (Fig.4): Sign reads, “We are not thieves, we don’t take without asking.”

AP (Fig. 5): “Police attempt to arrest protesters at Prince Edward MTR Station.” [24]

which is to illustrate the “relations between iconoclasm and representation.” [17] As phrased by Stubblefield, the “media stagings of monument death” have “worked their way into collective imagery,” where he quoted examples of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Iraq, the Berlin Wall, and the World Trade Center to illustrate instances where eradication replaces the perished artifact of its monumentality. These artifacts live on, despite their own deaths, through the proliferation of an image-based media.

Since the occupation, the LegCo council, as symbolic of a space as it is, cannot be imagined without the imagery of its destruction. Its antechamber, with uses highly sanctioned by the Government, was a space that afforded very limited actions. This brief reclamation allowed provocative performances to happen, expanding on the public’s perceptions of that environment through seeing images of the destruction on the media.

Brian Leung, a protester who climbed the desk in the antechamber and removed his mask to give a speech during the storming, [18] was a good example of how the protest created a new meaning to the architectural space (Fig. 3). The occupation has unlocked new affordance of this piece of furniture, a new action performed on the furniture that was invented by the unique culmination of peo132

ple, events, and consequences during the movement. Like the Saddam Hussein statue that was better remembered by the American audience as toppled than erected, the antechamber desk is similarly perceived now as stood atop instead of sat behind. As the media revisits the iconography of the desk in future press coverage of the law-making process inside the LegCo building, people cannot escape the memory of the occupation even when the “presence and absence” of Leung’s body in the space is “interchanged,” in the words of Stubblefield. [19] Thus, the mobilization of this symbolic and widely photographed space in the antechambers was not just accurately targeted, but effectively so.

The “ways” of the renovation may be as accurate as the “siting” of it. Compared to highly inaccurate targeting (as argued by Herscher and Weiss) during NATO airstrikes in Kosovo, which was at some point ridiculed by its abrupt bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade [20], the protesters were focused on vandalizing targets that acted as violence against democratic progress. For example, “the portraits of three current or former pro-Beijing Legislative Council presidents have been destroyed by protesters,” while “the photos of two lawmakers who had served in the colonial era were left intact.” [21] The architectural casualty was minimized. By being specific of the destruction targets, the protesters earned their credibility with their accuracy (which Feher believes to be important for non-governmental activism [22]), especially when they were evaluated under the light of ‘renovators,’ a job aimed to be surgical and highly specific to the moments of architectural failure. An example is in Fig. 4, where the LegCo canteen was not only left intact, but the drinks inside the refrigerators were even paid for. Similarly, libraries and cabinets containing valuable and historical artefacts were spared from damage. [23]

the government, but partially privatized by shares sold on the stock market), having semi-public/ semi-private spaces. The MTR spaces are also simultaneously “over-governed” and “under-governed,” in Feher’s terms . [27] According to Feher, “governing agencies face two opposite kinds of reproaches from their nongovernmental counterparts. They can either be accused of abusing their power and privileges or be blamed for relinquishing their duties and responsibilities. In the first case, nongovernmental activists seek to counter the intrusiveness of governing agents. They thus take them to task for governing too much. Conversely, in the second case, what is deemed intolerable is the carelessness of those who govern.

The latter, in other words, are indicated for not governing enough.” [28] The July 21 Yuen Long attack (Fig. 6) is an example of police “under-governance.” “On July 21, an armed mob indiscriminately attacked returning demonstrators, journalists and civilians” inside the station, while the police were accused of colluding with those mobs. “Victims decried the 39-minute delay before their arrival, the closure of police stations and the poor response of the 999 emergency line.” [29] This form of negligence can be read as the police’s acknowledgement of the riot as a private conflict between opposing individuals, thus acknowledging MTR’s spaces more as private than public. They regarded the conflicts within MTR’s spaces as not being immediate threats to public safety, thus not earning a priority in law enforcement more concerned with public crimes happening in public spaces. This incident can be compared to the police inaction in addressing the murders of Palestinian citizens in Israel’s Palestinian communities, motivated also by differences in political views. [30]

Mass Transit Railway The targeting of MTR is best illustrated by the July 21 Yuen Long attack and the August 31 Prince Edward station incident. The former saw passengers attacked by white-shirted thugs inside stations and carts, [25] while the latter saw rampant police violence in carrying out arrests inside stations (Fig. 5). [26] The duality of the events is instrumental in understanding the conflicted state of MTR, existing between a public and private entity (The MTR Corporation Limited is owned primarily by

Eliz Windsor via 將軍澳。烽火台/ Facebook (Fig. 6): A wall mural on the Lennon Wall in Tseung Kwan O. Similar to Fig. 2, this drawing reproduces the two protagonists of the July 21 Yuen Long Attack, namely the mobs and the architecture train station.

Notice also the turned backs of the police officers on the left, which symbolizes the two officers seen fleeing the station after witnessing the unfolding attack.

However, the August 31 Prince Edward station incident tells an opposite side of the story, evoking accusations of “over-governance.” Riot police from the Special Tactical Squad carried out arrests inside the station and trains, in the process exercising force including pepper spray, beating by batons, and pepper-ball guns. This mode of police enforcement calls into comparison Weizman’s “Lethal Theory,” [31] which he analyzed the “infestation” operation in Palestine by Israeli military as perpetuating a “borderless public space” to replace “private spaces” during these agents’ operations. [32] In the operation in 2002, Israeli Defense Forces blasted through walls of the Palestinian settlements in Nablus to establish horizontal movement through the city. Weizman problematizes this mode of operation by the scale of violence exerted to civilians/casualties. The operation defeated private spaces (supposedly of security and comfort), which were set up to precisely avoid and protect casualties in public conflicts ranging from warfare to protests, from indiscriminate terrorism to targeted assault. Thus, the operation becomes a dangerous premise where traditional affordances of spaces inside a city are challenged. Agamben’s essay, ‘the camp,’ talks about “the breaching of the physical, visual and conceptual border/ wall [exposing] new domains to political power, and thus [drawing] the clearest physical diagram to the concept of the ‘state of exception.’” [33] Similar to the “infestation” operation in Palestinian settlements, the Hong Kong police’s treatment of MTR’s spaces as legitimate public spaces for enforcement echoes the militarization of the city.

This concept that applies to MTR’s spaces is increasingly relevant to the context in Hong Kong, where, since June 2019, increasingly more premises—from private shopping malls and university campuses to private homes and residencies (with or without search errands)—are observed as places of law enforcement. [34] Like in Palestine, the Hong Kong police continue to relax restrictions of practicing arrests within private premises, expanding the “state of exception” to the entire state.

Many parallels can be drawn between Israeli and Hong Kong police forces, where law enforcement is only observed strictly when the subjects are politically attuned to the establishment.

Overall, there seems to be an unresolved role of MTR, whether the architecture is a public good (where civilians and police forces pay the same price for tickets) or a political tool (where the use by police force takes priority over civilians). It is

also a question of whether the architecture has exercised the mechanism of price discrimination (between those who pay and do not pay for tickets), or discrimination based on political hierarchy.

The confusing tactics that protesters used specifically in renovating this site reflect the ambiguity between the publicness and privateness of the architecture.

In the first form of renovation, protesters destructed turnstiles, ticket-issuing machines, add-value machines, and various revenue-collecting interfaces to target the commercial mechanisms of the architecture, rendering it unfit to perform business transactions. It can also be read that they are targeting the failure from “under-governance,” where the result was MTR’s incapability to provide safety (or a sense of it) to customers.

The second form of renovation sees protesters slowing down services as part of a “non-corporation movement,” [35] thus renovating the operational nature of the architecture. In this case, protesters target the public service nature of MTR. The protesters took advantage of MTR’s spaces being, for the most part, public spaces, to interrupt operations of the architecture to affect both themselves and other civilians. It can also be read as countering “over-governance,” where the police’s appropriation of their perceived public space as legitimate places for arrests was resisted by the protesters’ own appropriation of the same space into stages for non-corporative performances.

Through the comparison between modes of violence coming from both sides, one could understand that the tools of deployment are different for each. As a governmental organization, which owns most of the major railway in the city and administers law-enforcement, the Hong Kong government was able to “reshape the battlefield” [36] (as described by Weizman of the “infestation” operation) with little resistance. This is in stark contrast with non-governmental activism on the part of protesters. Protesters used hammers, bats, even their own bodies, to carry out disruption on a much smaller scale, exposing themselves to many risks, as will be discussed later. The massive asymmetry in scale and effectiveness of tools between governmental and non-governmental entities has been hardly overcome throughout the protests since June.

[17] Thomas Stubblefield, “Iconoclasm beyond Negation: Globalization and Image Production in Mosul,” The Aggregate website (Transparent Peer Reviewed), Volume 3, December 12, 2016. Accessed November 26, 2019, http:// we-aggregate.org/piece/iconoclasm-beyond-negation-globalization-and-image-production-in-mosul.

[18] Alvin Lum, “’It wasn’t violence for violence’s sake’: the only unmasked protester at storming of Hong Kong’s legislature gives his account of the day’s drama,” South China Morning Post, July 5, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/ hong-kong/politics/article/3017327/it-wasnt-violence-violences-sake-only-unmasked-protester.

[19] Stubblefield, “Iconoclasm beyond Negation.”

[20] John Sweeny, Jens Holsoe, and Ed Vulliamy, “Nato Bombed Chinese Deliberately,” The Guardian, October 17, 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/17/ balkans.

[21] Zhou, “Protest messages decoded.”

[22] Feher, Nongovernmental Politics, 24-25.

[23] Lum, “Unmasked protester at storming.”

[24] Rebecca Speare-Cole, “Hong Kong protests: Violence escalates as police hit protesters with batons in metro station,” Evening Standard, September 1, 2019.

[25] Jeffie Lam, Danny Mok, Alvin Lum, “At least 45 injured as rod-wielding mob dressed in white rampages through Yuen Long MTR station, beating screaming protesters,” South China Morning Post, July 22, 2019, https://www. scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3019524/ least-10-injured-baton-wielding-mob-suspected-triad.

[26] Phila Siu, Alvin Lum, and Zoe Law, “Chaos on Hong Kong’s MTR network as police chase protesters into station and arrest 63,” South China Morning Post, September 1, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-andcrime/article/3025241/chaos-hong-kongs-mtr-network-police-chase-protesters.

[27] Feher, Nongovernmental Politics, 19.

[28] Feher, Nongovernmental Politics, 19.

[29]Elson Tong, “Explainer: The Yuen Long mob attacks and Hong Kong’s triads – why do some consider the New Territories ‘lawless’?,” Hong Kong Free Press, July 27, 2019, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/07/27/explaineryuen-long-mob-attacks-hong-kongs-triads-consider-newterritories-lawless/.

[30] Jonathan Cook, “Israeli police ‘turning a blind eye to killing spree,’” Middle East Eye, October 10, https://www. middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-police-turning-blind-eyekilling-spree.

[31] Eyal Weizman, “Lethal Theory,” Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain, https://onlineopen.org/ lethal-theory, 3.

[32] Ibid., 5.

[33] Ibid., 6.

[34] Ng Kang-chang and Clifford Lo, “What rights do Hong Kong police have when it comes to entering premises? All you need to know following Sha Tin mall clashes,” South China Morning Post, July 18, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/ news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3019048/do-hongkong-police-have-right-enter-public-premises.

35] Joanna Ma, “Hong Kong protests: MTR disruptions planned for Lai King, Fortress Hill and Kowloon Tong train stations on August 21,” Young Post, August 20, 2019, https://yp.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/113955/hongkong-protests-mtr-disruptions-planned-lai-king-fortresshill-and.

[36] Eyal Weizman interviewed by Philipp Misselwitz, “Beyond Human Rights,” eds. Aaron Levy and Eduardo Cadva in Cities Without Citizens (Philadelphia: Slought Foundation, 2003), 167-198.

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Handout (Fig. 7)

133

and the presence of them in a specific time and place as material to renovate. The existence of the body between the closing doors obstructed the train of its use. The presence of the body in the image as an integral part of the architectural dysfunction highlights that the violence of MTR had prompted people to fend against it using their bodies. Protesters argue that the magnitude of the counter-violence, in terms of stopping people from commuting to jobs on time thus invoking economic loss, can and should be overlooked, given the risks (of injury and arrest) they have exposed their bodies to through their acts of protest. Judith Butler expresses a similar idea in “Bodies in Alliance,” where she associates the exposed risks of protester “performativity” (vulnerability and precarity) with the power of those messages they wish to convey. [39] Following Butler’s explanation, the extent of counter-violence exerted by protesters actually attests to the extent of violence exerted to them by the regime.

midnight_glue/ Instagram (Fig. 8)

However, it will be argued that the aesthetics of protesters’ renovation attempts to overcome this divide. Most images that come out of police enforcement are bad optics for the police and for the governments that sanctioned their tactics. A late August Washington Post article was one of the many news stories from the West to point out cases where police engaged with architecture, including the August 11 firing of pepper balls in Tai Koo station, the releasing of tear gas canisters in indoor MTR stations, and the police violence during the August 31 incident, were in violation of international standards. [37] Due to the ‘leaderless’ nature of the movement, protesters are mobilized to create individual moments of struggle. A wealth of photos could be mined, amplifying the aftermath of the power of their counter violence and soliciting solidarity on the international stage.

Protesters use aesthetics to challenge the symbol of MTR as a benign public good, and replace its symbol as a political and even violent tool of the regime, through their renovation or iconoclasm.

The two examples below illustrate this argument.

In the first case, protesters used their own bodies to block carriage doors, in order to disrupt train service during rush hour [38] (Fig. 7). In architectural terms, protesters were using their bodies 134

Tom Grundy/HKFP (Fig. 9)

In the second case, protesters employed a Yes Men-like tactic to promote their cause inside the MTR. An activist quoted by Standnews as “midnight_glue,” created anti-extradition stickers based on the five demands [40] (Fig. 8), which were designed to imitate the same aesthetic as the official stickers from MTR that usually propagates alert messages such as “please mind the gap” or “do not exit or board when doors are closing.” This tactic invokes a comparison with the Bhopal disaster orchestrated by Yes Men, two anti-corporate activists who posed as Dow Chemical spokespersons to appear on a BBC World interview. [41] The Hong Kong protester used an imitation of aesthetics and location (activist stickers were pasted right on top of the official stickers) to hijack the official channels for their propagation of pro-democracy causes. The activist stickers were seen appropriating the sentence structures—for example, satirizing “please mind the gap” with “please mind the thug”—where they referred

back to the July 21 Yuen Long attack by thugs and MTR’s inability to defend passengers against the attack. To the perspective of protesters, the purpose of these safety stickers failed to account for the true source of danger: the crass police enforcement rather than merely the gap between the platform and the closing doors of the train.

Both cases can be understood as the protesters mobilizing not only the mass media, but also localized media such as way-finding (warning) signages inside subway stations, to establish effective ways that their pro-democracy causes get disseminated. Where the first case commands with visual impact, the second case does so with humor, wit, and creativity.

Beijing-friendly shops, Chinese banks and ATMs

This portion of the essay hinges on the perceived reality that China weaponized their economic advantage overseas. This is an opinion raised by political analyst Josh Rogin [42] and articulated by scholars on China affairs, including Kevin Carrico and Michael Cox. [43] This controversy not only encircles businesses between US and China, but also Hong Kong and Mainland China. China does so by applying censorship to companies that trade with it, [44] including their spokespersons, managers, and employees, evident already in occurrences such as the NBA (US) [45] and Cathay Pacific (HK). [46] Therefore, many people would argue that overseas Chinese capitalist influence sees those shops and companies as both facades of Chinese power and active sites of political exclusion and violence asserted by those inflated powers.

However, this category of targets is differentiated from the aforementioned two categories in the following lens: 1) unlike MTR, where the railway basically monopolizes transit in certain places, these shops face competition in the capitalistic market of Hong Kong, making the option of boycotting clearly viable as an alternative to destruction (one can exercise his or her right not to patronize those businesses without infringing other people’s rights to do so, lowering the neediness of the latter); 2) these businesses belong to the private sector, meaning that they may be far from the “center of gravity” (in Clauswitz’s term) [47] and may be complex social structures that employ or involve many innocent bystanders when confronted with counter violence;

Tom Grundy/HKFP (Fig. 10)

風波裡的總代理 - 劉心暉 Thomas/ Facebook (Fig. 11): Yifang fruit tea branch in Hong Kong recovered by protesters after misguided renovation

3) in a free market economy that champions the freedom of speech, is the attack in the name of freedom itself undermining the very values the protesters demand? Through these lenses, a few key renovation events will be analyzed that concern these businesses.

In the first case, examples are identified where the purpose of renovation revealed hidden power structures, misinformation, and lack of information due to issues of transparency and accountability common among Chinese businesses. These examples reveal the protesters’ distrust in other citizens who they deem as unable to look past the marketing campaigns by those businesses to identify the purposefully concealed modes of violence (renovators establishing superiority over non-renovators). Protesters argue that to patronize those businesses in turn funds the prospects of oppression against themselves.In other words, exercising their freedom to patronize those businesses (in a free-market economy) essentially funds the operation in which infringing this very notion of

freedom is its ultimate goal. Examples include the Bank of China branch that was spray-painted with the words “investing in death” (Fig. 9), and the Xiaomi smartphone store by “U(You) are connecting 2 (to) the database” [48] (Fig. 10), alluding to the state-controlled data infrastructure by China.

What adds to the violence of these businesses in the private sector is the idea that the Chinese influences are in fact very muddled, disguised, and made purposefully unclear to the regular consumer. The Starbucks franchise in Hong Kong, which carries the cultural import from the freedom-championing United States, is in fact owned by a parent company (Maxim’s) whose owner (Annie Wu) is an avid supporter of Beijing’s oppression in Hong Kong. [49] The divorce between the appearance of its cuisine and problematized source of capital attest to the protesters’ trained and intimate knowledge of the power relationships that overarch the Hong Kong market.

However, the process of identifying these Chinese influences is in itself a site for contestation and open to many debates between the media, protesters, and business affiliates (owners, managers, front-line employees, etc). One of the most cited examples is the Hong Kong franchise of Yifang Taiwan fruit tea, where after the Taiwan social media voiced support for the ‘one country, two system’ policy and condemnation of the anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong, renovations were prompted to attacking its Hong Kong stores.

Protesters were to discover afterwards that the Hong Kong franchise owner was in fact an avid pro-democracy supporter. After discovering that, protesters organized clean-ups and sent letters of apology [50] (Fig. 11). Due to the tools being used (mostly limited to spray paint on surfaces or breaking glass panels) being far less powerful than that which would be used in international warfare, the effects of destruction were able to be reversed and made void In the second case, protesters used renovation as a tool or tactic to reverse the violence that these businesses produced. Examples include Yoshinoya, a Japanese restaurant where a social media manager who insulted the Police Force on their page was sacked. [51] A ‘Lennon Wall,’ which embodied the symbol of freedom of speech and expression, was prescribed outside of the facade to show and voice out support to the employee, and as a remedy to metaphorically cure the corporation of its political censorship (Fig. 12).

[37] Shibani Mahtani, Timothy McLaughlin, Tiffany Liang, and Ryan Ho Kilpatrick “ In Hong Kong crackdown, police repeatedly broke their own rules – and faced no consequences”, The Washington Post, December 24, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com › world › hong-kong-protestsexcessive-force.

[38] Tsang and Wong, “Protesters disrupt Hong Kong’s MTR.” [39] Judith Butler, “Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street,” eds. Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 117-139.

[40 立場報道, “「反送中」標貼現港鐵車廂 創作團隊開放 原圖 籲市民參與「撕一貼百」,” Standnews, July 21, 2019 [41] Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, and Satinath Sarangi, “The Yes Men in Bhopal,” interview by Bridget Hanna, eds.

Michele Feher, in Nongovernmental Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 524-528.

[42] Josh Rogin, “The NBA is only the latest Chinese government hostage,” The Washington Post, October 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/07/ nba-is-only-latest-chinese-government-hostage/.

[43] Javier C. Hernandez, “Leading Western Publisher Bows to Chinese Censorship,” The New York Times, November 1, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/ world/asia/china-springer-nature-censorship.html [44] “Remarks by Vice President Pence at the Frederic V. Malek Memorial Lecture,” Foreign Policy, White House, last modified October 24, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefings-statements/remarks-vice-president-pence-frederic-v-malek-memorial-lecture/.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Jill Disis and Clare Duffy, “Cathay Pacific says it could fire staff who support Hong Kong protests,” CNN Business, August 12, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/business/cathay-pacific-hong-kong-protest/index.html [47] Ibid., 104.

[48] Cheng, “Explainer.”

[49] Ibid.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Sun Xinqi and Elizabeth Cheung, “Yoshinoya Hong Kong steams at local advertising agency as disputes over extradition bill roil local workplaces,” South China Morning Post, June 12, 2019, https://www.scmp. com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3018423/yoshinoya-hong-kong-steams-local-advertising-agency [52] Cheng, “Explainer.”

[53] Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 109.

[54] Thomas Keenan, “Looking Like Flames and Falling Like Stars. Kosovo, the First Internet War,” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Volume 7 (2001 - Issue 4): 539-550, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630120107692.

[55] Ibid., 545.

[56] Ibid., 544.

[57] Eyal Weizman, “The Pulse:Global protests in 2019: discussion with Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman & the HK conte” interview by Liz Yuen, RTHK, Youtube, December 21, 2019, audio, 3:27, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ThCkcbqsN7E&t=675s.

[58] Keenan, “Kosovo, the First Internet War,” 545.

[59] Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 435-449, https://doi. org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-435.

[60] 林祖偉, “香港抗議者的「裝修」和人人自危的「親中」 企業,” BBC中文, October 15, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/ zhongwen/trad/chinese-news-50010488.

[61] 明報財經 mpfinance, “優品360林子峰：被「裝修」 感無辜 不減薪不裁員繼續走下去,” Ming Pao, November 3, 2019, https://www.mpfinance.com/fin/instantf2. php?node=1572781736745&issue=20191103.

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May James/HKFP (Fig. 12)

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Another example is Best Mart 360, a food retailer whose owner was accused of severing ties with the “Fujian gangs” who assaulted protesters in earlier demonstrations. [52] The damage done to these shops invoked the aesthetics of chaos, extrajudicial punishment, and anarchism. The mob violence that they supported became the very reason and experience they themselves were exposed to.

As aforementioned, the collapse of complex businesses may incur many casualties. The scaling back of these businesses in response to renovation leads to laying-off employees, some of whom may well be in solidarity with the protesters. Hong Kong protesters ran the same criticism as NATO in the Kosovo bombing, where architectural entities were understood with blatant reductivism into “a schematic set of functionalist concepts,” [53] where agents within those architecture/institutions also were assumed no autonomy from the spaces that they inhabited.

Conclusion In the essay “Looking Like Flames and Falling Like Stars: Kosovo, the First Internet War,” comparative literature and human rights scholar Thomas Keenan attributed NATO’s intervention in Kosovo as the first war out of the emerging Internet era.

[54] From it, many unprecedented conditions arose, such as the “erasure of abstraction” and representation of the enemy “in ways that erode ethical certainty.” [55] Compared to the sporadically functioning internet and “erratic” phone lines that one Boston Globe reporter noted in Kosovo in 1999, [56] in Hong Kong 2019, the internet era has endured generations of evolution, and improved in scale, coverage, speed, and other unimaginable ways. As Weizman said in an interview on Radio Television Hong Kong in late December, the 2019 Hong Kong protests are recorded by many cameras “of the same incident from different perspectives.” [57] Weizman is describing a radicalization of the transparency in Hong Kong that Keenan imagined the Kosovo era beginning to embody, where opacity of enmity is totally defeated, a concept that redefines the repercussions and after-lives of violence and counter-violence through the proliferation in media. [58] Hong Kong does not suffer from a shortage of visual evidence. However, despite the improved technology, the Hong Kong protest is represen136

tative of political conflicts under the Information Age, where documentations are exposed to risks of the very same piece of technology, namely misinterpretation of information (or misinformation).

It is thus useful to reiterate the sources of visual content this essay has drawn from: 1) local Chinese and English media outlets, e.g. Hong Kong Foreign Press, South China Morning Post, Apple Daily, Standnews, etc; 2) local correspondents of international outlets, e.g. AP, Reuters, New York Times, Buzzfeed News, BBC, CNN, etc; 3) self-documentations of protesters on social media platforms, e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LIHKG, Telegram, etc.; and 4) self-documentations of police and government released also in their social media accounts and own official websites.

The first way that both sides of the conflict use the “battle of images” [59] is the construction of an aesthetic that plays into their own respective argument, through highlighting and obstructing certain parts of the over-abundant visual information accumulated from live-streaming by media and even the state-controlled surveillance footage. A prominent example is how the renovation of 360 Best Mart is portrayed in pro-Beijing and liberal media.

While BBC Zhongwen decides to run the headline image of a young, athletic, masculine figure hurling bricks at a store (Fig. 13) [60], Ming Pao, a Chinese-funded newspaper, features the sobbing face of company president Lam Tsz Fung, pleading for the understanding of Hong Kong protesters (Fig. 14). [61]

Getty Images/ BBC (Fig. 13)

李紹昌/ Ming Pao Finance (Fig. 14): Suffering from multiple renovations and boycotts, Best Mart 360 president Lam Tsz Fung says, “I have never done anything to Hong Kong people that I have to sorry for. I will persist.”

This “battle” should be examined with a larger political backdrop in mind: the US-China trade war and an overall competing power dynamic between Eastern and Western values. It is evident that Western journalism acquires imagery that instantly conveys an eye-catching narrative, tasked with raising the interest of a foreign audience to a faraway democratic uprising in Hong Kong. The foregrounded in-action BBC shot of the individual protester hails him as a heroized fighter, presumably of democracy, an image the Chinese party would commonly accuse of “encouraging and indulging street crimes.”

Whereas Ming Pao chooses to not only focus on the present, but also the afterlife of the renovation (foregrounding what is seemingly in the background), where longer-term casualties are involved, speaking of battered business owners, and laid-off employees whose families are devastated due to the loss of job security resulting from the architectural destruction, many cases uncompensated by insurance companies.

Herscher wrote about the aesthetics of humanitarian destruction during the Kosovo War, which was problematic in a similar way, where he formulated that the videos released by NATO “shot by cameras mounted on precision-guided weaponry and surveillance aircraft,” as carrying misleading aesthetics that distracted people from violated human bodies. [63] The visually stimulating pre-impact footage released to overseas audiences distracted them of an equally (if not more) relevant aesthetic of the warfare poised by NATO, which was the post-impact footage that could be observed on the ground and/or from other perspectives. While this essay ceases at establishing which aesthetic is more relevant than the other in the Hong Kong protest, the case study proposed by Herscher is likened to the strategies of distraction employed by both sides of the conflict.

The battle of images is enacted in a second way where given the ubiquity of media, the public still suffers from the withholding of access to key evidences and subsequently proliferating the absence of a well-rounded aesthetic. Keenan illustrated this in “Mobilizing Shame,” where he spoke of how “the warring factions” of Kosovo “were interested in concealing the full extent of their activities” through exercising “restrictions and repressions” to members of the foreign press. [64]

In Hong Kong, one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon occurred during the August 31 Prince Edward station incident, where state-controlled surveillance camera footage inside stations cannot be obtained by the public.

The absence of that aesthetic has not only prohibited the public from fully understanding the arrest, especially amid rumors of deaths caused by the police’s violent arrests, but also prompted protesters to reconstruct an aesthetic borrowed from Chinese funeral customs through the renovation of the station exit with floral tributes to commemorate the suspected killings (Fig. 15). [65] The aesthetic of the August 31 incident is hardly well-rounded and by association, accurate, in this case due to the image-documentation process dominated by one side of the conflict.

“metaphors.” [68] The battlefield to achieving the surrender of the governments does not lie in how much volume of pro-China business gets disrupted by the renovation, but by how many members of the international audience are swayed to empathize or rather condemn after seeing the imagery of renovation.

Another strategy of this prohibition or withholding to full access of events is done by physically disrupting the camera, using barriers or tools like torches. This is employed largely by the police during the protest, especially in occasions where arrests (usually violent) are carried out behind the blockade (Fig. 16). Protesters, on the other hand, employ the same tactic during renovation, where they use umbrellas to avoid the destruction and destructors from being caught on camera (Fig. 17). The mask-wearing tactic (as well as hiding their identification number) is of course another way to obstruct the full access of police officer identities to avoid complaints. The same tactic is used by protesters to avoid arrests and doxing by the state.

Sam Tsang (Fig. 15)

The aforementioned strategies attest to this protest being labelled a battle of images, as both sides control what is being seen to limit feeding to the other side’s aesthetic. This is largely aimed to limit the enmity’s ability and accuracy to “mobilize shame” against themselves. [66] It is evident that the protesters’ self-released imagery of renovation—such as Fig. 4, 6, and 8, 11 that proclaim a non-violent, powerful, creative, and even humorous aesthetic—is in contrast with pro-China publications, such as Fig. 14, 17 that portray the exact same event of renovation through a detrimental and questionable lens. This essay agrees very much with the opinion that the battleground for legitimacy of renovation in the Hong Kong protests, or rather all post-20th century conflict, lies in a skillful construction of aesthetics/optics determined by, in Keenan’s terms, “the time and forces of those images,” [67] as well as their power as

Screenshot from livestream from Apple Daily https://www.facebook. com/hk.nextmedia/videos/443926829534876/ (Fig. 16): Midnight of 2019-08-05 in Wong Tai Sin

[52] Cheng, “Explainer.”

[53] Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 109.

[54] Thomas Keenan, “Looking Like Flames and Falling Like Stars. Kosovo, the First Internet War,” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Volume 7 (2001 - Issue 4): 539-550, https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630120107692.

[55] Ibid., 545.

[56] Ibid., 544.

[57] Eyal Weizman, “The Pulse:Global protests in 2019: discussion with Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman & the HK conte” interview by Liz Yuen, RTHK, Youtube, December 21, 2019, audio, 3:27, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ThCkcbqsN7E&t=675s.

[58] Keenan, “Kosovo, the First Internet War,” 545.

[59] Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2004) 103 (2-3): 435-449, https://doi. org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-435.

[60] 林祖偉, “香港抗議者的「裝修」和人人自危的「親中」 企業,” BBC中文, October 15, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/ zhongwen/trad/chinese-news-50010488.

[61] 明報財經 mpfinance, “優品360林子峰：被「裝修」 感無辜 不減薪不裁員繼續走下去,” Ming Pao, November 3, 2019, https://www.mpfinance.com/fin/instantf2. php?node=1572781736745&issue=20191103.

[62] Huaxia, “Chinese FM denounces violence, foreign interference in Hong Kong,” Xinhua, October 23, 2019, http:// www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-10/23/c_138494300.htm.

[63] Herscher, Violence Taking Place, 111.

[64] Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” 443.

[65] Kimmy Chung, “No protesters killed during police actions, Hong Kong government says, as it slams ‘malicious’ rumours swirling about deaths during mayhem at MTR station,” South China Morning Post, September 7, 2019, https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/ article/3026184/no-protesters-killed-during-police-actionshong-kong.

[66] Keenan, “Mobilizing shame.”

[67] Ibid., 448.

[68] Ibid., 438.

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Screenshot from video by Speakout 港人講地/ Youtube https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2aTRejNCyE (Fig. 17)

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[1] Jacob, Claus and Adam Walters. “Risk and Responsibility in Chemical Research: The Case of Agent Orange.”

(2005).

[2] Pat Hynes, “While citizens embraced ‘Silent Spring,’ a poisonous war raged on,” Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, accessed May 2, 2020, https://traprock.org/whilecitizens-embraced-silent-spring-a-poisonous-war-raged-on/.

[3] David Zierler, Invention of Ecocide (Athens and London: the University of Georgia Press, 2011), 3.

[4] “Gas Attack on the Somme,” Canadian War Museum, accessed May 6, 2020, https://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/objects-and-photos/photographs/battles-and-fighting-photographs/gas-attack-on-the-somme/.

[5] Anna Feigenbaum, Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today (London, New York: Verso Books, 2017), 24.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 26.

[8] Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide, 35.

[9] 小肥波, “【催淚彈】過期催淚彈會否更毒 催淚煙致眼睛 皮膚不適如何清洗？,” 香港01, August 14, 2019 [10] Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide, 105.

[11] K Kwong, “點解最近啲催淚彈咁多煙同咁高温？,” 獨 立媒體, November 6, 2019, https://www.inmediahk.net/ node/1068408.

[12] Anna Feigenbaum, “Riot Control Agents: The Case for Regulation,” Sur – International Journal on Human Rights, Vol. 12, Issue 22 (December 2015): 101-113.

CRITIC: MARK WASIUTA YEAR: SPRING 2020 BRIEF: ARCHIVES OF TOXICITY TITLE: TEAR GAS AND AGENT ORANGE- BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENT/ COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY ATMOSPHERES IN THE AGE OF CHEMICAL MODERNITY

Introduction: Tear gas in Hong Kong protests and Agent Orange in Vietnam War are compared alongside each other in this paper because they both help regimes build atmospheres that become favourable to counterinsurgent/ counterrevolutionary forces.

The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam War by the US military, historically notorious for its unaccountability and crassness, widely researched by scholars such as activist and scholar Barry Weisberg and oral historian David Zierler, becomes a prompt to study a much more recent use of tear gas in Hong Kong during and beyond the 2019 protests. The regimes that impose them share much more resemblances than those on the receiving ends- the American Imperialism post-1954 saw the counterinsurgent efforts in Korea and Vietnam, which can be seen in parallel to the 21st century expansionism by emergent Chinese empire towards geographic and political peripheries, e.g. Taiwan and Hong Kong. These two regimes both like to experiment on technological warfare, more specifically substances, in one case herbicides, napalm during guerrilla wars, on the other technologies of spatial oppression by the Hong Kong police such as CS gas, pepper solution in water cannons, and pepper sprays, coupled with emergent surveillance technologies.

The use of these substances can be positioned in a larger discourse of chemical toxicity, from the Ypres war during World War I as documented by Peter Sloterdijk, to the waging of chemical war against pests and weeds using DDT as documented by Rachel Carson. However, these two substances are especially relevant to architects and spatial thinkers in that these substances are believed to be highly specific to the architectures of the target areas, that is the Vietnamese tropical jungle and the “concrete jungle” of Hong Kong.

The Architecture of Trees by Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi provides conceptual framework in imagining trees as a collection of elemental characteristics that differentiate one species from another, thus war that takes place in a Vietnamese forest is differentiable to those in other forests and non-forests; while books such as City without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook or literature on the “wall effects” due to “the alignment of highrise buildings” in Hong Kong provide entry points in understanding Hong Kong as an urban context of considerable delineation from other cities and non-cities.

138

What is at stake in this comparison? In the spirit that history tends to repeat itself, this paper draws on conceptual fallacies and common controversies associated with the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam War, as a prompt to conceptualize and perhaps problematize the less researched use of tear gas in Hong Kong protests. The following categories may yield valuable results in comparing the two substances:

produced? How are these registers accurate or inaccurate?

3)Environmental- What are the nature of these gases? This paper traces those substances from the moment of release, to hitting their targets that are the insurgencies or targets complicit to them.

It looks at the distribution of these substances as a design problem, and the gas engineers as designers of the counter-insurgent/ counter-revolutionary environments for law-/intervention-enforcement troops. It also examines the series of failures in the targeting can be questioned through various accounts and statistics.

Political:

An illustration from book The Topography of Tears (Courtesy RoseLynn Fisher)

“Synthesis of 2,4,5-T. Pathway 1 shows the desired reaction leading to the active ingredient for herbicides. Pathway 2 is a side reaction leading to an unwanted dioxin contamination. In addition to TCDD, a range of other impurities of varying degree of toxicity is formed. Insert upper right: the chemical structure of 2,4-D.” [1] (Courtesy Claus Jacob & Adam Walters)

The intention to bring together the two substances is registered by the observation that both the uses of Agent Orange and Tear Gas traverse the elusive boundary of legitimacy and legality under international laws and protocols. However, it is due to many complications, mostly related to delays and difficulties of enforcement, that much abuses of substances remain unpunished or unpunishable. Agent Orange, a formulaic mixture of herbicides, is sprayed in adversarial territories in Vietnam titled Operation Ranch Head in Vietnam. [2] As Geneva Protocol “prohibits only weapons that harm or kill people, not plants,” the use of Agent Orange remained largely legal under international law. [3] Critics would disagree, calling the operation an ecocide, which Weisberg defines that in Indochina as “the premeditated assault of a nation.”

Its origin as a mixture of two commercially available herbicides seem to absolve it of the connotations with chemical warfare, both inside of international courts or outside in the public eye. However, instead of the commercial purpose of supporting agriculture, the military purpose obstructs agriculture or rather all plant life in enemy territories, a distinction that was seldom accounted for.

1)Political- How was the use of gas during the two conflicts compared in relation to the origins of those gases? How do those uses reveal problems of accountability and legality, especially in relation to international protocols and conventions?

2)Cultural- How are the gases and their toxicities archived or aestheticized in the history of their existences? Who and how are those archives “Gas Attack on the Somme” (Courtesy George Metcalf Collection, Canadian War Museum—19700140-077) [4]

Tear gas originates from the chemical warfare in World War I which was highly efficient but inhumane. A peacetime use for this wartime technology was demanded, amid a century when America anticipated “imperial interests abroad,” [5] where the Chemical Warfare Service capitalized due to the “commercial interests of the growing chemical industries.” [6] Through mitigations of the Ypres battle formula and questionable trials, tear gas was hurried to the riot-control market propelled by the “impressive PR campaign that turned tear gas into a ‘harmless’ weapon” [7] by General Amos Fries. Fries’s campaign, sustained by more contemporary reports such as that by Sir Harold Himsworth, marketed tear gas into the arsenal of especially colonial and imperial regimes around the world, one of them being the Hong Kong Government (where moments of large deployments are noted as the 1967 riots before handover, the WTO protest by South Korean farmers, the 2014 Occupy Central and the 2019 Anti-ELAB protests after handover). The marketing also circumvented tear gas of the regulation of the Geneva Protocol, which was prompted in the first place by its predecessor in Ypres.

The word harmless, or less-lethal, became a catchphrase of those campaigns, and its literary use is in fact hardly unprecedented, in the analysis of Agent Orange. Herbicides is known as “harmless to soil and capable of selectively targeting certain plants” such as weed, [8] similar to how tear gas is said to target only rioters/ protesters. This paper problematizes the notion of harmlessness, and the substantiation of testing behind it, usually executed by the manufacturers of the substances themselves.

The notion of harmlessness of these substances can be problematized in the following three categories. This paper documents not only how claims of harmlessness can remain inclusive or even become misleading, but also how the violation of these three categories constitute evidences of violence that challenges the legitimacy of these law-enforcing regimes as well as calling for their accountability. Firstly, the scale of deployment becomes crucial in determining exposure of individuals to toxicity, spread across space and time. The variety of conditions related to protests and riots, including number of insurgents, their distribution and relationship with surroundings determine it unrealistic to foresee the time and dosage each individual is exposed to, and remain antithetic

to scientific experiments that rely on controlled variables. For example, the infamous Himsworth Report marketed CS as “druglike,” clearly ignoring the antithesis that tear gas can be absorbed in safe doses given the unreliability of air as medium of delivery. In the case of Agent Orange, and many occasions tear gas also, concerns of bioaccumulation or chemical residues in food chains and the environment are raised, amounting to continual toxic exposures to humans over long stretches of time.

Secondly, the site or the space of deployment is another source of variables. Case studies around enclosure, air circulation of particular spaces will be examined further in a later section of the paper.

Tear gas collected in Hong Kong protests 2019, showing expiry date of 2016. (Courtesy HK01) [9]

Thirdly, the conditions of those chemicals are an object of concern. It should be noted that Agent Orange, or other rainbow agents, or tear gas, are not homogenous products that solicit equal responses irrespective of contexts and infrastructures from which these products arise. Although their contents may be sanctioned by world governments, such as specifications of Agent Orange issued in US military contracts, there are cases known where manufacturers of substances circumvent or even violate those sanctions for the sake of cost or speed, one being the additional creation of by-product dioxin in Agent Orange due to expedited military demands as noted by Zierler. [10] Chemist K. Kwong also acknowledges the difference between Chinese-made and firstworld-countries-made tear gas. [11] In response to public concern of expired tear gas canisters in Turkey, Feigenbaum comments that they may be more dangerous as being chemically unstable.

[12] These aforementioned concerns are to say that fairly commonly, the deployment missions of these gases may already be test grounds themselves, from the experimental technological

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warfare in a foreign land as distant from the US as Southeast Asia, to the historically unprecedented counterinsurgency crackdown in Hong Kong.

The unrestrained testing of substances to bodies and ecologies, whether in the Vietnam War or way into the 21st century, remain highly contested and problematic.

In continuation of the last point, it should be noted that the main difference between the two moments is the time gap between the use of Agent Orange and the current use of tear gas in Hong Kong. It remains uncertain that the legacy of the Vietnam War has asserted any impact on the use of tear gas in general, as many believe the loophole of US’s unregulated use of herbicides, which have circumvented the Geneva Protocol due to its definition that warfare is launched not on bodies but on plant species, has been somewhat corrected by the 1977 Environmental Modification Convention that outlaws also environmental modification techniques such as defoliation using chemicals.

[13] The controversy of tear gas being a harassing agent apparently lies at the definition of its context of deployment, whether as a method of warfare or for riot control, grouping it to a separate discourse with Civil Right movement in the US and religious dissent in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. [14] The largest similarity of the two substances is still their projected use of substituting out laborers of war or agents of counterinsurgency, a practice which promises less cost for regimes. [15] This advantage of gases over soldiers/ policemen can be questioned, but this underlying rationale for gas deployment is not dissimilar between the 1960s and the 2010s.

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“Tear gas fired during clashes between anti-government protesters and anti-riot police at the junction of Nathan Road and Argyle Street in Mong Kok on October 27.” (Courtesy: Sam Tsang/ SCMP) [16]

Cultural: This section of the paper investigates the aestheticization of the gaseous substances, which is how chemical modernity is registered through images and archives. Chemical modernity is represented in these two substances, which are technological compounds encoded with histories of molecular revolutions and toxic atmospheres of modernity from the 20th century. The aesthetics of this chemical modernity is extracted from “readings of architecture, art history,” the mass media and pop culture, statistics and data, scientific journals, and other visualized moments of ecological and environmental culture through which “toxicity and pollutants come into view.” [17] The aesthetics can be grouped into two categories: short-term and long-term.

Images of the gases are made, during its moment of release into the environment from their respective compacted containers, whether barrels in the case of Agent Orange, or canisters in the case of tear gas. The physical attribute that both gases are colorless (AO is also odorless) render it almost invisible to the human eye except the short interval immediately following its point of deployment, where toxic clouds containing a high enough concentration of chemical particles come into view, before dispersing and receding from human’s perception. Each submunition release smoke for approximately 25 seconds, and each tear gas cartilage has around four submunition.

[18] The majority of photographs of tear gas are captured in the first few minutes of release, where white clouds rising slowly to the surrounding fill the camera frame. Writer Antony Dapiran describes tear gas in Hong Kong: “Tear gas rounds describe a graceful arc as they drop down out of the blue sky, trailing feathery tails of smoke like streamers. The shells hit the road with a ping, and sparks fly as they skip gaily along the asphalt. As they roll to a stop, the shells hiss like an angry snake, dense smoke pouring out of the top of the small aluminium canister, and soon the street is enveloped in clouds of smoke.” [19] As accurately portrayed by Dapiran, the release of tear gas is a multi-sensory climax: the audible escaping of gas particles from a concentrated enclosure to the open, the engulfing smoke that permeates, the stinginess and pungent smell that pervades and catches the wind. After multiple rounds, it can be observed that the tear gas does

not only intend to disperse crowds, but generate an alternate atmosphere unsufferable without gas masks or respirators typically included in the police’s arsenal. As Dapiran notes, tear gas does not work only physiologically, but also psychologically.

By blinding the eyes and obscuring the sight, the aesthetic of fear and uncertainty is not just consequential, but functional. [20] Furthermore, Dapiran explains that “by creating a scene of violence and chaos, tear gas works to objectify the crowd, turning it from a group of human beings into a seething, writhing mass.” [21] The dehumanization of protesters is aided by the aesthetic of gas which turns “protests” into “riots,” both in person and portrayed through the media. The gas is engineered to produce the double effects of the aesthetics of chaos and chaos itself.

In fact, it can be argued that the aesthetics of Agent Orange distributed from aircrafts (noting that during the time Vietnam seldom holds aerial technology) display a superiority afforded by their imperialism and technological dominance over the Vietnamese adversaries. The aesthetics of Agent Orange is not only embedded in its mode of distribution, but is exclusive to those who are able to view it.

However, images of Agent Orange do not compel in the same way to tear gas primarily due to the scale of deployment. Images are not produced to accommodate the deployer, the deployee, and the gas simultaneously in the same frame. The scale of Agent Orange is comparable to that of magnificent events of “Guernica, Auschwitz, or Hiroshima,” while white smokes that disappear within minutes are incomparable to “the image of destruction” of mushroom cloud or stench from the gas chambers. [24] This is not to underestimate the scale of Agent Orange’s violations of bodies and ecologies, but to account for the aesthetics of herbicides at this stage that is functional in its secrecy and ephemerality, opposite to that of tear gas or atomic bombs which instil fear and solicit surrender.

“The US sprayed Vietnam’s jungles to deprive the enemy of places to hide” (Courtesy: AP) [22]

Agent Orange is released up from nozzles of aircrafts, helicopters, and sometimes from portable tanks by ground soldiers. One spray run is a few minutes, and can disperse particles on a swath as wide as 80 meters. Historical aerial images capture long stretches of white smoke puffing from an aircraft zooming by, as the clouds slowly dissipates and descends into the forest underneath.

Unlike tear gas which is targeted towards protesters, Agent Orange is secretive, works in the background, usually invisible to people who may receive it. Photos that document it are viewed from a higher level, presumably from other aircrafts, and are normally produced by the US military who are the sole participants of the war having the technology (which Zierler notes as “the fusion of science and air power” [23]) to do so.

“Mangrove forests, like the top one east of Saigon, were often destroyed by herbicides.” (Courtesy http://www.livinghistoryfarm. org/farminginthe50s/life_08.html) [25]

The aestheticization of gases do not stop at the short-term, but extends to more prolonged toxic legacies and scales not perceivable to the human eye. This part of the paper refers to registers of toxicity that comes into view in ways other than gaseous concentration. These registers as much accounts for the contamination, purification, and mediation, effectively expanding the environmental archive into the architecture and infrastructure of daily life. In examining the prolonged aesthetics of both tear gas and Agent Orange, the aesthetics of death, and the aesthetics of fear of uncertainty arise as recurring themes in collected images, which are derivatives of the aesthetics of chemical modernity. The aesthetics of fear is perhaps best articulated by Rachel Carson, where she describes “a fable for tomorrow” as bleak, lifeless, and derelict. [26] Unlike atomic warfare or gaseous extermination where the horror is reigned upon the land in a climactic fashion, traceable to a fascinating moment of explosion or chemical reaction, Carson refers to the permeation of biocides as “a strange blight,” an “evil spell,” “a shadow of death,” and “stillness” into our agricultural landscapes, [27] similar to how they slyly crept into Americans’ livelihood culturally speaking.

The toxic cloud is never described, but visualized by the reactions of species and beings it crosses path with. Agent Orange, a similar herbicidal compound, is most known to the public through casualty images either of deformed Vietnamese babies or affected American war veterans, largely mobilized as part of a class action lawsuit against manufacturers in pursuit of war injury compensation in the 1980s. [28] Images of disabled children can be read with a similar lens to images of dead trees and defoliated forests, where young humans or seedlings are impeded of normal growth, either through hormonal redistribution (in the case of plants) or induced genetic mutation (in the case of humans).

The unstoppable drift of biocide in the case of Vietnam or America is paralleled in tear gaswhere the death brought by herbicide (either by its inherent hormonal affect or its by-product dioxin) defies boundaries of mediums, species, and even generations, the death of tear gas also knows no boundaries and penetrates biological and ecological chains. Since the start of protests, members of the public in Hong Kong have observed the surge of dead birds on sidewalks and in the city, [29] despite the Hong Kong Government’s claim that tear gas poses no public health risk [30]-

[13] “Convention on the prohibition of military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques,” Treaty Collection, United Nations, last modified December 10, 1976, https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVI-1&chapter=26&clang=_en.

[14] Simon Parry, “The truth about tear gas: how Hong Kong police violated all guidelines for the ‘non-lethal weapon,’” South China Morning Post, August 16, 2019, https:// www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3022942/truth-about-tear-gas-how-hong-kong-police.

[15] Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide, 78.

[16] Letters, “Is tear gas in Hong Kong making polluted city take a toxic turn?,” South China Morning Post, November 19, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/ article/3038222/tear-gas-hong-kong-making-polluted-citytake-toxic-turn.

[17] Mark Wasiuta, Syllabus of Archives of Toxicity taught at Columbia University GSAPP, Spring 2020.

[18] Parry, “The truth about tear gas.”

[19] Anthony Dapiran, City on Fire: the fight for Hong Kong (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2020), Prologue: City of Tears.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Karishma Vaswani, “One Square Mile of Vietnam: Da Nang,” BBC, August 23, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-23497563.

[23] Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide, 27.

[24] Weisberg, Ecocide in Indochina, 1-2.

[25] “Agent Orange,” Wikipedia, accessed May 7, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange.

[26] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston, New York: Mariner Books, 2002), Chapter 1.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Jesse King and Cecilia Chou, “Agent Orange Birth Defects.” Embryo Project Encyclopedia (2017-03-07). ISSN: 1940-5030 http://embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/11443.

[29] Verna Yu, “Dead birds and rashes: Hong Kong residents fear teargas poisoning,” The Guardian, December 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/04/ nowhere-is-safe-hong-kong-residents-fearful-of-teargaspoisoning.

[30] “LCQ18: Health impacts of tear gas residue,” Press releases, The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, last modified December 4, 2019, https:// www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201912/04/P2019120400260. htm.

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“Microplastic fibers, like this one from an Oregon river, are less than 5mm and often show up in vivid color under the microscope.”

(Courtesy Todd Sonflieth/ OPB) [32]

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Tear gas bullets rarely melt paint on road in high temperature, use of Chinese-made tear gas suspected. (Courtesy Apple Daily) [36]

a claim that can be problematized following the earlier section of the paper. In addition, a frontline reporter’s diagnosis of “chloracne, a skin condition that has been linked directly to exposure to dioxin-like substances,” [31] help people trace the aesthetics of tear gas as an attack mechanism that overcomes the defence of the body (skin, respiratory, etc) to cause illness or bodily alterations.

The conditions of Agent Orange and tear gas are reminiscent of that of petrotextiles as theorized by Kirsty Robertson. Petrotextile is representative of a paradox that encapsulates chemical modernityit is marketed for its predictability or explication in performance (cheap, customizable) constituting of a reliable aesthetic in the 20th century, when in fact, it is only later revealed of its unpredictability in harmfulness whether to environment or to bodies (causing bioaccumulation of microplastics in the environment). [33] Men’s unfathomability with manufactured chemicals is not only embodied in petrotextiles, but also in Agent Orange and tear gas, where their premature and untested aesthetic of harmlessness are already problematized in an earlier section of the paper. It can be argued further that the aesthetics of unpredictability that many groups try to prove is exactly a fear tactic employed purposefully by regimes. In the case of Agent Orange, Carson’s emergent campaign as well as surfacing evidence that military decision-makers were in fact aware of the dioxins in herbicides supplied by companies speak to a disregard of consequences, [34] exercising deliberate harm to another country. In the case of tear gas, the Hong Kong government’s reluctance to produce a record of tear gas contents, despite public fears of long-term health risks, [35] can be read as a fear tactic to discourage protests.

The aesthetic of fear of uncertainty is fully expressed in the following examples. In Hong Kong, 142

viral photos of Chinese-made tear gas canisters melting the bitumen road circulate widely. The dangerous temperature of Chinese-made tear gas, which is identified as the Jing An KF-302-20, is questioned to have caused heightened toxicity than First-World-countries-made tear gas. The distrust towards the Chinese Communist regime thus, by extension products made there, is weaponized by the police force to generate fear among protesters. As reporter George Colclough puts it, “it is no secret that the Chinese produced CS munitions… are more dangerous than the munitions produced in the West… But what is less known is exactly why this is the case.” [37] While chemical differences between the tear gas sourced from two regions remain inconclusive, the widespread distrust carried by rumors and key opinion leaders is sure to have caused deterrence. In Vietnam, photographs of barren land and defoliated branches supplement fears of an invisible enemy that is technologically advanced, lurking and haunting on the battleground, and are strikingly similar with textual imagery invoked by Carson. Images like these can be argued to not only propagate the seeming success of US’s technological warfare, but also to disincentivize local insurgencies. The aesthetics of fear manipulated in both cases is inherent to the dominance of chemical modernity whereby chemicals and their effects are never fully conceivable, and are deliberately kept that way.

Environmental: This part of the paper looks both inside these two gases, and outside of them simultaneously.

This part of the paper first examines the nature of gases, their distinct activation of air as a medium, then at the site of Vietnam War and Hong Kong’s Anti-ELAB protests- the site is defined not just in terms of regionality, but also of temporality. This part of the paper theorizes that decisions to deploy these gases are culminations of a multiplicity of forces, from the preface of place-specific architecture, to the design of gases which is a problem of product design, [38] then attempts to use the historical prompt of Operation Ranch Head to evaluate the tear gas deployment in Hong Kong in 2019.

Sasha Litvintseva outlines the physical properties of asbestos as a way to explain its toxicity on human bodies. She attributes the toxicity of asbestos to its “fibrous nature of its molecular structure that allows for its entanglement with organic tissues,”

thus physically piercing a human cell when in contact with it and causing fatal fibrosis in lungs. [40] Litvintseva’s implied understanding of chemical modernity can be applied to Agent Orange and tear gas, which unlike asbestos are purely manmade. Their engineered chemical compositions and microscopic/ molecular workings embody chemical subjectivities made to serve the function of altering landscapes of war such that regimes enjoy a tactical advantage over insurgencies.

In addition, its form as “moisture” enables it to “[stick] to and [cover] everything it touches,” [45] thus it is able to release continual toxicity to the architecture and clothing, and bodies inside of it.

The idea of chemical modernity means that there are countless ways that tear gas may be toxic to the body regardless of whether or not the confines of scientific knowledge makes explainable of them, while the expansion of the realm of toxicity from individual bodies to the surrounding environment widened the possibility for causing causalities across time and space scales.

Similarly, it can be said of Agent Orange. Zierler refers to chemical compositions of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T as “[wreaking] havoc on the plant’s hormones” “via absorption through the leaf.” [46] Agent Orange “defoliated approximately five million acres of forests in an attempt to expose communist guerrilla fighters loyal to the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.” [47] This especially fragile cause-and-effect correlation is challenged in this paper, whereby in addition to scale and condition as aforementioned, the question of site becomes a major source of complications that problematizes the legitimacy of this war tactic.

“Scanning electron microscope image of anthophyllite asbestos.”

(Courtesy Pedro Hernandes/ USGS) [39]

This particular tactic recurrent in the discourse of chemical modernity can be traced as early as the Ypres gas warfare, which Sloterdijk describes: “The 20th century will be remembered as the age whose essential though consisted in targeting no longer the body, but the enemy’s environment.”

[41] According to Feigenbaum, tear gas refers to “chemical compounds” consisting irritants such as CS, “primarily affecting the mucous membranes and respiratory system.” [42] According to author Dapiran, tear gas “obliterates the solidarity of the crowd.” [43] The intended function to disperse crowds and evacuate key protest zones is encoded in the advanced balance of chemicals. Tear gas is released as “a fine particulate smoke,” or “a vapour” that is light enough to travel in air as medium.[44] Through air it migrates to human bodies, traversing the boundaries of skin and external organs into blood stream and the respiratory channel.

The first complication is the difficulty of delivering particles of herbicide from nozzles of aircraft flying 50 meters above tree cover successfully to the leaf surfaces of the targeted plant species in the forest. [48] James Brown, scientist sent by John F. Kennedy to evaluate herbicidal missions “called attention to an ironic side effect of herbicide application atop the forest canopy: defoliation permitted sunlight to reach the forest floor, where it triggered dense vegetative growth at ground level, particularly bamboos and imperata (buffalo) grasses.” [49] It misunderstands the Vietnam forest is a singular object, when in fact forests are in themselves complex spatial and organic configurations that are constituted of layers, coverings, overlaps, and coexistent relationships between different plant species. Not only is it a hasty understanding of forest, but it is also a hasty understanding of trees, which as landscape architect Franca Stagi points out, trees are conceived “as things, as objects,” primarily skewed by people’s “anthropocentric view of the world.” [50] Stagi notes the cluster, “light or sparseness or density or transparency of the crown,” as well as “shape and size of the leaves” to catalogue “the architecture of trees.” [51] It should be debunked also that every tree acts equally as the visual obstruc-

tions to US troops- when in fact the undergrowth, a section of the forest as Brown notes prospered under herbicidal missions, was disproportionately more significant in “[inhabiting] the lateral visibility” of US troops inside a forest, [52] given the ergonometric of a most likely male and able-bodied Caucasian soldier. A study of the physiology of Vietnam’s “multi-canopy jungle” will have revealed that the upper canopy which consists of the dominant “plant family Dipterocarpaceae” will receive the majority of aerial spray and its effects. [53] The failure of attaining the intended effect of Agent Orange is attributed to the blind faith of chemical modernity (chemical abilities to target specific species, specific trees) while disregarding the layers and complexities of information laden in existent analogue landscapes.

[31] Hong Kong Free Press, “Hong Kong reporter diagnosed with chloracne after tear gas exposure, prompting public health concerns,” Hong Kong Free Press, November 14, 2019, https://hongkongfp.com/2019/11/14/ hong-kong-reporter-diagnosed-chloracne-tear-gas-exposure-prompting-public-health-concerns/.

[32] Erin Ross, “Scientists Discover Microplastics In Northwest Oysters And Clams,” Northwest Public Broadcasting, November 13, 2019, https://www.nwpb.org/2019/11/13/ scientists-discover-microplastics-in-northwest-oysters-and-clams/.

[33] Kristy Robertson, “Oil Futures/ Petrotextiles,” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, ed. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman (London, Chicago: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2017), 242-263.

[34] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 8.

[35] Tim Hamlett, “Come off it, Mr Law! Hong Kong’s tear gas recipe should not be a state secret,” Hong Kong Free Press, December 8, 2019, https://hongkongfp. com/2019/12/08/come-off-mr-law-hong-kongs-tear-gas-recipe-not-state-secret/.

[36] “【抗暴之戰】疑國產催淚彈極高溫 罕有熱融路漆！或 釋更多毒素,” 蘋果日報, October 21, 2019, https://hk.news. appledaily.com/local/20191020/UW5GOAV2NC2EX5U23WXORRGUIQ/.

[37] George Colclough, “Explainer: Why China-made tear gas is more dangerous,” Hong Kong Free Press, May 1, 2020, https://hongkongfp.com/2020/05/01/explainer-whychina-made-tear-gas-is-more-dangerous/.

[38] Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Frankfurt: Semiotext, 2009), 9.

[39] “Asbestos - anthophyllite (photo),” Radiopaedia, accessed May 7, 2020, https://radiopaedia.org/cases/asbestos-anthophyllite-photo.

[40] Sasha Litvintseva, “Asbestos: Inside and Outside, Toxic and Haptic,” Environmental Humanities 11, no. 1 (May 2019): 156, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7349466.

[41] Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 14.

[42] Feigenbaum, Riot Control Agents, 19.

[43] Dapiran, City on Fire, Prologue: City of Tears.

[44] Feigenbaum, Riot Control Agents, 19.

[45] Ibid., 20.

[46] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 1.

[47] Ibid., 2.

[48] Alvin Young, The History, Use, Disposition and Environmental Fate of Agent Orange (New York: Springer, 2009), 72.

[49] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 74.

[50] Franca Stagi, “The City, Green Space, and the Architecture of Trees,” in The Architecture of Trees, ed.

Cesare Leonardi and Franca Stagi (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), 16.

[51] Ibid., 17.

[52] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 74.

[53] Young, The History, Use, Disposition and Environmental Fate of Agent Orange, 59.

[54] Steve Hung Lam Yim, Alexis Kai Hon Lau, and Jimmy Chi Hung Fung, “Air ventilation impacts of the ‘wall effect’ resulting from the alignment of high-rise buildings,” Atmospheric Environment 44, no. 10 (March 2010): 1367, https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosenv.2009.07.002.

[55] Stagi, “The City, Green Space, and the Architecture of Trees,” 15.

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“Velocity ratio [of air] at pedestrian level (2 m above ground).”

(Courtesy S.H.L. Yim, J.C.H. Fung, A.K.H. Lau, and S.C. Kot) [54]

Stagi theorizes that surfaces of plants (leaves) are similar to that of the “man-made city” (glass, metals of buildings). [55] Tear gas’s reliance on air to transmit subjects itself to the unreliable chemical and physical variables of air, which Eva Horn 143

identifies “in disciplines such as climatology, atmospheric chemistry, physics and medicine.” [56] One of the main intents of chemical modernity was to “seize the complicated nature of the air” and render air “not so much as mere matter but as a medium.” [57] However, air as a medium problematizes claims of harmfulness made in reports on tear gas, such as the Himsworth report that divorces toxicity from geographical and urban contexts of place- It was used to justify cases from Northern Ireland, to Israel, to Waco, Texas, thus goes against the correlation drawn by Horn between air and regionality.

In a city as topographically complex as Hong Kong, the analogue landscapes are rampant with literal layers of “pedestrian infrastructure, public transport and natural topography,” according to Frampton, Wong, and Solomon. [58] The city is composed of “microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell,” unique to its “urban spatial hierarchy.” In addition, the “alignment of highrise buildings in complex building clusters,” an urban condition unique to Hong Kong, [59] should see the use of tear gas at the very least cautioned by knowledge (or rather a lack of) of “the wall effect.” [60] While there is a lack of studies to investigate the potential correlations between the wall effect and tear gas, the wall effect is scientifically hypothesized to have caused abnormalities in air ventilation performance indicators such as “the velocity ratio” and the “retention time of pollutants at street level.” [61] Such observations may increase the temporal and spatial exposure to toxicity, as to further discredit harmless claims of tear gas. Given the similar complexities of the ‘concrete jungle’ of Hong Kong and a multi-canopy forest in Vietnam, the illegitimacy of Agent Orange as an effective means to achieve the military intent should serve as a prompt to follow the accuracy of rationale of tear gas deployment, which is proclaimed to disperse crowds at a non-fatal thresholds of toxicity.

The second complication is the high likelihood of these substances to cause casualties, in relation to the unique architectures of Vietnam and Hong Kong. The toxification of the environment as a resultant legacy of 20th century chemical modernity/ warfare inevitably complicates the extents of battle, rendering all bodies present in war environments as adversaries.

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“Sample HES map of the Mekong Delta. ‘A’ and ‘B’ scores are in red, ‘C’ scores in blue, ‘D’ and ‘E’ scores in green, and ‘V’ for Vietcong controlled hamlets in red.” Map shows high ambiguities and adjacencies between regions controlled by opposing forces.

(Courtesy Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library) [62]

The architecture of Vietnamese forests, which are highly vegetated and well-covered, allows Viet Cong guerrilla forces to shift bases easily and become high adaptive and mobile in locations. The extensiveness of Operation Ranch Hand (spraying of five million acres of South Vietnam which is 12 percent of Vietnam) is explained by Zierler as the failure to “meaningfully distinguish between enemy and civilian areas.” [63] In fact, the grading of hamlets based on their likeliness to revolt against the Republic of Vietnam remained one of the America’s most prioritized military missions and was arguably of little success. Zierler argues further that the distinguishing of enemy from civilian was “in some cases” not even the intention of the MACV (US Military Assistance Command), which further supports his definition of herbicidal missions as an ecocide. [64] It can be argued that the US’s indiscriminate attack on all areas is necessitated by the architectural advantage of the forest afforded to VC soldiers, however much unjustified by the careless harm done to civilian bodies and ecologies.

The high likelihood of inflicting causalities is paralleled in the use of tear gas in Hong Kong urban areas. As noted by Frampton, Wong, and Solomon, boundaries between urban programs are often muddled, defined more sensationally than tectonically. [65] For example, architect and historian Eunice Seng has noted for example “the pre-1980 composite building typology” in Hong Kong, where “a heterogeneous mix of people, functions, private, communal and public spaces… produces an unprecedented social dynamism.” [66] Composite buildings are representative of the mixed-use de-

velopments that are prevalent in the land-scarce, hyper-dense city. The police’s unprecedented use of tear gas affects “areas home to 88 percent of Hong Kong’s 7.4 million residents,” or 14 of 18 districts as of August, 2019. The operation in Wong Tai Sin on August 5th for example, drew much controversy as public housing towers with “the territory’s highest concentration of elderly” were adjacent to the street protest zones. [67] Hong Kong protesters were also known to exploit ‘be water’ tactic, term used to describe their high mobility in confronting the police. This tactic is highly sited in the architecture of Hong Kong, where streets and overhead network infrastructure are often well connected, as protesters flow through “parks, shopping malls, train stations, and residential areas” [68] with ease. The desperation of counterinsurgency forces of Hong Kong is not different from that during the Vietnam War, where the deployment of gaseous substances can be read as an architectural countertactic, which is highly affiliated with the histories of chemical modernity.

A final note on the question of site is that military rationale is often rendered unrealistic, even sarcastic and bogus when mapped against the realities of the site. Parallels can be drawn between the defoliation aim of herbicides and disaggregation aim of tear gas. The “counterproductive effect” of Agent Orange as revealed by Brown was not only ignored, but “repeatedly minimized” in “military assessment reports.” [69] This discovery challenges the military mandate and suggests the mandate goes against the understanding of the site’s architectural characteristics. Instead, Zierler’s argument of ecocide accuses the US government of waging an indiscriminate war against the ecologies and bodies of Vietnam. Zierler observes, “it was the centrality of herbicides to a war strategy that portended the deliberate technological destruction of a nation.” [70] The importance of Agent Orange in this line of military operation makes it hardly convincing that only insurgents were meant to be harmed in the whole process.

The hostility towards communism by military decision-makers, if not also by successive White House administrations in the Cold War, seem to provide explanations for this scorched-earth tactic. Weisberg cites another reason for the ecocide in Indochina- “the production of war-related knowledge and products” [71] - when in fact, the reasons suggested may not be mutually incompatible of each other.

In addition, the police’s aestheticization of blackclad protesters as “cockroaches” [74] is equated to America’s portrayal of Vietnam’s tropical wilderness as landscapes of weed in need of removal. [75] The aesthetic of genocide (parallels with mustard gas in WW2 also) is increasingly evident, for which the dehumanization of protesters or the decontextualization of plants by regimes precede the justification of extermination tactics using weed-killing or insect-killing sprays. These assaults by the police, according to just war theory scholar Ping-Cheung Lo, amount to not just animosity, but also notions of extrajudicial punishment and retribution, and can be explained by widening chasm of political views and values between police and communities of Hong Kong, [76] paralleling racial (WW2) and ideological and national (Vietnam War) conflicts.

21:15, 21:45 of July 14, 2019 in Shatin, Hong Kong. Blue lines represent police blockages, blue dots represent policemen, yellow lines represent retreat trajectory of protesters, yellow dots represent protesters. Diagrams show the police’s persistent chase of protesters, as well as cornering of protesters inside Shatin New Town Plaza mall. (Courtesy Stand News) [72]

The juxtaposition of the police’s rationale against Hong Kong’s site-specific architecture problematizes the police’s claim that tear gas is used for disaggregation of social bodies with minimum force as a spatial policing measure. In 2019, there were multiple occasions where malls, railway stations, and other semi-enclosed or enclosed spaces were gassed with canisters, where some of these spaces often do not permit rapid crowd dispersals. In a few occasions, the entrances of mall were blocked by the police, at the same time that pepper spray and batons were used inside the mall. [73] The architecture of interior spaces become a way to trace the limits of disaggregation, thus inauthenticity of police’s claims, supporting accusations of the police of using tear gas to facilitate arrests of protesters, or worse, the imposing of excessive toxicity towards political dissents.

Toxicity of tear gas within architectural enclosures is magnified due to the reduced velocity of air and increased retention time of particles, conferring it harmful tendencies.

It can be argued that chemical modernity has always belonged to regimes of power, whether authoritarianism or imperialism since its conception in the 20th century. These regimes now hold more power than ever in exercising spatial violence, after the epistemological or technological discovery that air can be seized not as “a bearer of life,” as Horn puts it, but a bearer of death also, [77] activated by the right chemical mixture. These regimes, politically or commercially affiliated with not just producers of chemical modernity, but also with regulatory bodies, effectively control and manage how chemical modernity enters (or does not enter) the thresholds of perceptibility through technology of design and visualization, their power absolutely dominating that of vigilant activists and the general public. Agent Orange and tear gas are just two examples of the much larger arsenal of toxicity under this umbrella. Furthermore, the means to produce toxicity by far surpasses the means to measure, let alone to remediate, toxicity remains one of the most existential paradoxes of chemical modernity. The aesthetics of chemical modernity then becomes central in mapping these claims against impacts, offering archives of toxicity within myriad systems of representation that can be revisited later in time and distant in space.

[56] Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, no. 73 (Fall 2018): 7.

[57] Ibid., 8.

[58] Adam Frampton, Clara Wong, Jonathan Solomon, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (Novato: Oro Editions, 2012).

[59] Ibid.

[60] Hung, Kai, and Chi, “Air ventilation impacts of the ‘wall effect.””

[61] Ibid.

[62] Oliver Belcher, “Sensing, territory, population: Computation, embodied sensors, and hamlet control in the Vietnam War,” Security Dialogue (August 2019): 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010619862447.

[63] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 85.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Frampton, Wong, and Solomon, City Without Ground.

[66] “The City in a Building: Composite Buildings in Hong Kong, 1950s-1970s,” University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture, accessed May 3, 2020, https://www7.ad.arch. hku.hk/research_project/the-city-in-a-building-compositebuildings-in-hong-kong-1950s-1970s/.

[67] Sheridan Prasso, “Millions in Hong Kong Have Been Exposed to Tear Gas Since June,” Bloomberg, November 6, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2019-11-05/up-to-88-of-hong-kong-population-exposed-to-tear-gas-since-june.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 74.

[70] Ibid., 27.

[71] Weisberg, Ecocide in Indochina, 6.

[72] 亞裹, “【重組．沙田衝突】是驅散還是圍捕？ 警方如 何觸發新城市廣場混戰,” Standnews, July 17, 2019 [73] Mary Hui, “How shopping malls became a battleground in Hong Kong’s protests,” Quartz, July 24, 2019, https:// qz.com/1671507/shopping-malls-are-battlegrounds-inhong-kongs-protests/.

[74] Mary Hui, “Hong Kong police are now routinely insulting the city’s people as ‘cockroaches,’” Quartz, September 10, 2019, https://qz.com/1706106/hong-kong-police-call-protesters-cockroaches/.

[75] Zierler, Invention of Ecocide, 2.

[76] T-Fai Yeung, “Hong Kong protests: Does violence work?,” Hong Kong Free Press, Feburary 16, 2020, https:// hongkongfp.com/2020/02/16/hong-kong-protests-violencework/.

[77] Horn, “Air as Medium,” 13.

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