Sans Seraph

Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels (1995) is one of the most arresting movies to emerge from the now internationally celebrated Hong Kong cinema. Initially appearing to be a cross between Blade Runner, After Hours and MTV, it soon manages to carve its own idiosyncratic space in both the viewer's psyche and the archive of Asian urban imagery. Following the dreamy movements of Hong Kong's demimonde, Wong's film captures the hyper-alienated cultural climate of a city which has been cut loose from its previous colonial moorings, and now floats uncannily between the political grids which link Chinese and British history.

In his book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, Ackbar Abbas points to this “floating identity” as an integral part of a fundamentally liminal community. He writes: “Hong Kong has up to quite recently been a city of transients. Much of the population was made up of refugees or expatriates who thought of Hong Kong as a temporary stop, no matter how long they stayed. The sense of the temporary is very strong, even if it can be entirely counterfactual.” Abbas goes on to trace the perceived shift from what he calls Hong Kong's “reverse hallucination” – not seeing the obvious – to “a culture of disappearance.” Abbas thus argues that Hong Kong represents an unprecedented form of post-coloniality – a kind of profane limbo populated by terrestrial angels who can't quite locate themselves, and consequently suffer various postmodern strains of globalist symptoms. “Hong Kong is an example of a postculture,” he asserts, because “it is a culture that has developed in a situation where the available models of culture no longer work.”