Neon Signs in Cold War Hong Kong: Between Language Politics and Visual Hybridisation

ABSTRACT: Today, neon signs have mostly disappeared in Hong Kong. Yet, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Hong Kong’s neon signs were powerful representations of the city’s blended history and multilingual encounters after World War II. In splendid colours and various shapes, neon signs negotiated different cultural streams, promoted cultural diversity, and fostered local identities. From 1949 to 1978, when the borders between the Eastern and Western Blocs were heavily fortified, Hong Kong served as a gateway to China, where significant China–Western convergences took place within the city. Using digital archives to examine the hybridity and fluidity of neon signs in 1960s and 1970s Hong Kong, this article argues that neon signs serve as a platform where diverse cultural trends are combined and reinvented. First, I provide a chronological narrative of neon signs and show how they reflect the sociocultural tensions of Cold War Hong Kong. Second, by contextualising the neon signs against the unique historical period, I explore the interplay of languages, colours, and designs of neon signs that shaped Hong Kong as a liminal space in the bipolar system. I argue that, in linguistic and aesthetic terms, neon signs are symbols of Hong Kong as a Cold War city. Linguistic, aesthetic, and cross-cultural spaces constituted Hong Kong’s translational spaces, which witnessed the city’s gradual evolution from a culturally hybridised city into a cosmopolitan one. KEYWORDS: Hong Kong, neon signs, Cold War, linguistic/semiotic landscape, translation.