Wing Lam Michelle Chan
Research Topic
Print Work and Print Culture in Industrial Hong Kong, c. 1950s-1970s
Supervisor: Jennifer Altehenger
I am interested in print communication, industrialisation, work, and growing commodification in postwar Hong Kong. By centring printed items (textual goods, usable items, packaging and branded ephemera), my project not only engages with press and publishing as discursive mediums, but also uses print’s materiality to probe changes in creative work and consumer culture amidst industrial transitions. On one level, I ask how print and publishing workers’ socio-political and occupational experiences shaped both their fields and print media itself. On another, examining a time when governmental and non-governmental actors increasingly construed graphic design and promotional packaging as forms of communication, I situate the concept of “design” vis-à-vis the history of commercial art printing and contemporary notions of industrial development. Because Hong Kong’s print and publishing industries serviced domestic and export markets alike, I also pay attention to how varying transnational scopes mediated the content and forms of commercial packaging, books, magazines and usable print. To these ends, I use oral histories, industry files, business archives, newspapers and design ephemera.
My DPhil study is funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and the Magdalen College Graduate Scholarship in History, and my work is supervised by Dr Jennifer Altehenger. Also at Oxford, I developed my interest in print culture beyond its textual dimension during my MSt in Global and Imperial History and my BA in History and Economics. My masters work probed tensions between Hong Kong Chinese businessmen and cultural production during the Interwar, and my undergraduate research investigated diglossia and political journalism in 1905 Hong Kong amidst a transnational boycott movement. My research thus adopts an integrated lens on production and consumption, highlighting everyday voices within Hong Kong's local and transborder contexts.
