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Xixi "Marvels of the Floating City" - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Xi Xi eloquently conveys the mood of the city during the 1980s in this collection of stories. In the first half of the decade, the Chinese and British governments negotiated Hong Kong's fate, occasioning among the general population intense soul-searching and close scrutiny of their society.
- - - - ○ Challenging representation → talking about problems + discrepancies of representation
        ○ Likes to play with perception, illusion uncanniness; work is unconventional
        ○ Magritte's titles are rarely meant to be taken literally the title adds to the sense of mystery rather than clarifying what the image is about.
      - To Magritte: a painting was most successful when it defied the viewer's habitual expectations and resisted any logical explanation or verbalization”
      - surrealism: pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”
      - representation
        
        Magritte's text is doubly paradoxical. It sets out to name something that evidently does not need to be named (the form is too well known, the label too familiar). And at the moment when he should reveal the name, Magritte does so by denying that the object is what it is.; e.g. ceci nest pas une pipe
    - - literary work/source work & painting/artistic representation
      - ceci n'est pas une pomme: having literal description of Margritte's doubly paradoxical meaning; in this case, it sets out to name something that evidently does not need to be named, and at the moment when he should reveal the name, Magritte does so by denying that the object is what it is
    - - “Magritte noted that the image that we have in our heads is totally distinct from the object itself, which is located in the exterior world. Hence, the eye, too, is a false mirror because it deceives us into thinking that the image of the world in our heads is the reality itself.” (SECONDARY TEXT!)
      - Cinderella Story → is the floating city's existence depending on a miracle equating to the city not being permanent?? in other words... will everything revert back to its old self, where the floating city will no longer be stationary but instead will fall in the ocean or go up in the skies?
        
        Hong Kong's current state being temporary as well; doesn't know what is to come
    - - Sandro Botticeli + Li Ganglion painters → both are myths that talk about the arrival of spring, something positive;
        
        the wishful arrival of X representative of Hong Kong's current state of mind