Polyphonic Asia: Contemporary City Symphonies of Singapore and Seoul (original) (raw)

Narrating the City: Mediated Representations of Architecture, Urban Forms and Social Life, 2020

Abstract

This chapter extends scholarship on city symphonies to include two contemporary city films that play homage to Singapore and Seoul – arguably the leading global cities of Southeast Asia and East Asia, respectively. Unlike the early twentieth-century city symphony exemplars from Europe, which are distinctively tied to modernity, these millennial Asian features are clearly products of globalization. While the European films constitute documentations of an emerging global condition, the Asian films interrogate what it means to be a global city. Through a comparative study of Tan Pin Pin’s Singapore GaGa (2005) and PARKing CHANce’s Bitter, Sweet, Seoul (2014), three lines of investigations are pursued: how facets of each city are translated to film; how modes of production of Asian city symphonies differ from their Western predecessors; and how these different approaches illuminate innovations in the conceptualization and realization of the two films. In city symphonies, the city is cast to play itself, emphasizing the axiomatic fact that cities have their own distinct flavour. As such, they highlight characteristics unique to each city and its people. The comparative component is important: a single film may present several aspects of a culture but reading across several films can reveal certain underlying features, common themes and emerging trajectories.

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