Consumption of History Education in
the Hong Kong Museum of History
by
Janice Yin-lui Leung
A research thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Creative Media
School of Creative Media
City University of Hong Kong
April 2004
Principal Advisor
______
Linda Chiu-han Lai
© Janice Yin-lui Leung
All Rights Reserved, 2004
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge everyone who has contributed in this project, including the writers cited in the Bibliography section, the Hong Kong Museum of History, and all the interviewees who have been kindly responded to my questions. This project would not exist at all without their help.
Special thanks go to my principal advisor Ms. Linda Lai, for her continual guidance and support. She has opened my eyes in cultural studies and creative writing throughout the three years of my undergraduate studies, I treasure all the time we have talked and shared with each other. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my second advisor Ms. Anson Mak, also for her continual examination of this project. I gain a lot from her attitude in cultural studies, and I am very impressed by her devotion to teaching. Let me also express my gratitude to Dr. Hector Rodriguez who has been introducing me to the world of cinema, art and philosophy in my undergraduate studies. I would like to thank the teachers for having inspired and worked with me in all other projects. Their advice has been valuable, as always.
I would also like to thank my dear friends, especially Molly, Siu-yuk and Cinnie, who have been supporting me a lot during my hard times in school. They are the real sources of energy in my daily life! Lastly, I owe my beloved parents much more than I can describe in words, for all the love, tolerance and education they have been offering me throughout the twenty-two years.
ABSTRACT
This project began with the amazing phenomenon that I discovered in “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition space, the permanent exhibition of The Hong Kong Museum of History: the space was full of students running around searching for answers for their worksheets. This is very different from what I experienced in my primary and secondary school days. When I started collecting articles about the museum and the exhibition, I realized that none of them was dealing with proper history education based on the exhibition, nor the actual design of the exhibition. In general, their critique of the exhibition was lacking in empirical details. On such basis, this project aims to go beyond reviewing the existing paradigms in which “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition is commented by understanding authorities’ assumptions on visitors’ consumption of history in the museum, and taking note of how students re-appropriate the exhibition in actual moments of consumption. I therefore decide to carry out a more comprehensive research on “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition by employing a discourse overview on the existing criticisms of the exhibition, a narrative analysis of the exhibition space, and an ethnographic research on students consuming history education inside the exhibition space. And I realize from the project that students do not consume the exhibition in a direct manner but through the mediations of museum docents, school teachers and even worksheets assigned on location. Docents and teachers do not just act as mediators but like the students, they consume the exhibition creatively. Meanings of the exhibition space are also transformed by the practices of all these museum consumers.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT / iv
CHAPTER 1: / Introduction / 1
CHAPTER 2: / Critiques of “The Hong Kong Story”: a Discourse Overview / 17
CHAPTER 3: / An Ideal Hong Kong Story: a Narrative Analysis of “The Hong Kong Story” Exhibition Space / 33
CHAPTER 4: / Creative Consumption of “The Hong Kong Story” / 62
CHAPTER 5: / Conclusion / 84
BIBLIOGRAPHY / 91
APPENDIX I / Floor Plan of “The Hong Kong Story”, Hong Kong Museum of History (for Chapter 3) / 93
APPENDIX II / Photos Taken Inside “The Hong Kong Story” (for Chapter 3) / 95
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
“No, this part is irrelevant, let’s jump to another part…” a secondary school student yelled to his schoolmates, with a worksheet of multiple-choice questions in his hands.
This kind of dialogue is not unusual in my visits to the exhibition “The Hong Kong Story”, held in the Hong Kong Museum of History (HKMH). Indeed it happens nearly every time I see secondary or primary school students visiting there. You may ask: what does it mean by saying a certain “part” of the exhibition is “irrelevant”, and to what is it so “irrelevant”? Through my observation in the museum, students judging the “relevance” are actually seeking answers for their assignments. For them, a certain “part” of the exhibition is “irrelevant” does not mean that the “history” presented is “irrelevant” to Hong Kong, but the story told by this particular part cannot provide them any “relevant” answer for their worksheets.
By my observation, schools usually visit “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition during weekdays; in the most extreme cases, there can be as many as four to five groups of students coming from different schools staying in the exhibition at the same time! Students usually have to finish their visits in a very short period of time, like around one to two hours in general, yet they have worksheets to complete before the visit is over (mainly offered by their schools). No wonder they care if certain part of the exhibition is “relevant” or not, as they have to scan and skip and run fast from part to part inside the museum so as to hand in their assignments within the time limit! Of course there are a few exceptions: some students may choose to ask the security guards for correct answers to their exercises instead of yelling out among each other, while some others choose to lie on the theatre seats to kill time in the museum and refuse to fill in anything for their exercise sheets assigned!
Thinking about my own past as a primary and secondary school student, I cannot even recall once that I had joined my schools to visit the HKMH, neither had my friends around my age. We might have joined our schools to visit the Science Museum, or the Mai Po Marshes, but not a history museum. The scene described above – many students filling up the space of the whole HKMH “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition, frustrated with their annoying worksheets – surprises me a lot. I start thinking: in what contexts has the education of local history become as urgent as it is now in Hong Kong in the beginning of the twenty-first century? With worksheets in their hands, does it mean that primary and secondary school students are really learning about the history of Hong Kong? And what kind of history they are learning? How do various types of students appropriate the museum space and consume history education there differently? These are some of the questions that I would attempt to tackle in this project.
Introducing the Hong Kong Museum of History and its Permanent Exhibition “The Hong Kong Story”
I remember that I have been to the HKMH as a child, with my family and not my school though. At that time, the museum was still very small and located in the Kowloon Park, Tsim Sha Tsui. In fact, this museum was established in as early as 1975, situated inside the City Hall. Then it was moved around several places including the Kowloon Park in 1983. In 1998, it finally settled on the present location on Chatham Road South, Tsim Sha Tsui, right next to the Hong Kong Science Museum. In 2001, the permanent exhibition of the museum, “The Hong Kong Story,” was finally relaunched.
Around the time the museum was relocated and “The Hong Kong Story” was about to run, there were voices in the local mass media criticising the management of the exhibition, such as its enormous expenditure, and its spatial design being assigned by a Canadian designer without any local participation. The exhibition itself was also attacked. For instances the over emphasis of the prehistoric natural environment of Hong Kong, the exclusion of some important events like the 1967 Riot and the June Fourth Incident, and the general vagueness of the display, became the major areas with which critics found fault.
Objectives
One objective of this research project is to review the existing paradigms in which “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition is talked about. Indeed, there are several limitations in these paradigms. Critics’ research on the museum’s management along with the exhibition space is inadequate and their opinion turns out to be over assertive without factual substantiation. Thus my second objective is to understand authorities’ assumptions on visitors’ consumption of history in the museum, by comparing views between the top management and curatorial staff, and by analyzing the spatial arrangement of the exhibition. While it also seems to me that critics have assumed an ideal usage of the exhibition, I would point out that they have not included in their arguments the participation of visitors in the exhibition space.[1] Thus comes the last objective – to see how students re-appropriate “The Hong Kong Story” when consuming history education in the museum space. To serve these purposes, I propose the following perspectives and methodologies to study the exhibition.
Methodologies
Discourse Overview
The above criticisms of “The Hong Kong Story” will be captured and discussed as a discourse overview in the next chapter, “Critiques of “The Hong Kong Story”: a Discourse Overview”. Through narration, certain facts of an event are emphasized or else suppressed, as a result of which a particular way of reasoning is produced. With its repeated circulation across sites and locations of communication, certain “regimes of truth” would be generated and therefore give rise to a popular discourse, that is, shared knowledge of a general public in a particular context (Barker 2000: 78-9).[2] In discourse analysis, we have to study both the arguments and the circulation of a discourse. However, examining a discourse which is produced by narration is itself an engagement with narrative practice. Authors have their own standpoints and they select materials to write, it is inevitable that certain ideas in a discourse analysis are emphasized or de-emphasized through the author’s narration. When the ideas of a discourse analysis are given chance to perpetuate in society and become shared knowledge, the analysis may eventually give rise to other discourses. Also, discourse analysis does not ground itself with the actual physical space in our everyday life. Therefore, both “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition space and its usage cannot be revealed by a discourse analysis alone.
Despite its limitations, discourse analysis still contributes to my project. Through local paper media and the Internet, criticisms of the HKMH and its permanent exhibition “The Hong Kong Story” are circulated in society. I review them all together as a discourse. The arguments of the criticisms, also the channels through which the criticisms become consumable knowledge will be revealed. Shortcoming of the existing opinion made towards the exhibition, especially the disregard of context, will also be pinpointed. To overcome the problem, further types of intervention – narrative analysis and ethnographic research – have to be employed in addition so as to put the context to the foreground.
Narrative Analysis
Soon to be covered in the discourse overview, one of the problems of current criticisms concerns their spatial analysis of the exhibition, which appears to me to be inadequate and unconvincing. On such basis, I consider a close reading of “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition essential to my research. I propose to treat the spatial arrangement of “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition as a narrative text for analysis.
Narrative is “a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space” (Bordwell 2001: 60). Broadly speaking, narrative analysis as a branch of textual analysis examines a text as a narrative regardless of medium, in order to “disclose the deep structural patterning beneath the surface features of the artefact” (Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis 1992: 75). Structures and meanings are the two main areas to be studied in a narrative analysis, in this case the interaction of various elements which are common to all kinds of narrative, such as story outline, plot structure, characters, temporality, setting and voice of narrator are focused on (Ibid: 70).
The spatial arrangement of “The Hong Kong Story” exhibition will be studied as a narrative in Chapter 3, “An Ideal Hong Kong Story: a Narrative Analysis of ‘The Hong Kong Story’ Exhibition Space”. By locating narrative elements like content, structure, temporality, internal and external narrator in the exhibition, hierarchies of significance among events in “The Hong Kong Story” will be revealed. Narrative analysis thus leads me to the ideal Hong Kong Story embedded in material structures and its ideal usage that the HKMH presumes.
Narrative analysis, however, shares the same limitations of discourse analysis. The product of a narrative analysis is itself a narrative with the same property of cause-and-effect sequential order which favours some events while suppresses others. And generally speaking, anything beyond the text is not examined by textual or narrative analysis. Textual analysis is an interpretative approach that seeks for meanings of a text to signify the whole social order behind: it neither studies the actual context in which a text functions, nor considers the usage of a text. Ethnographic research, which strengthens the importance of users’ experience, has to be introduced in my project to reveal the actual usage of “The Hong Kong Story” that narrative analysis fails to achieve.