Extracting the thick and thin of Fragrant Harbour

This article explores the colonial history of Hong Kong, also known as the Fragrant Harbour, through an inclusive drawing process that uses urban artefacts, place, and time as subjects for excavation, documentation, and projection. This process draws upon the city’s thick and thin of sensory experiences - a phrase this paper understands to mean the physicality of urban arteries (roads and alleys) as well as sedimented layers of time and memory. This concept frames the drawing process as both an archaeological and speculative act: one that excavates the past while imagining futures yet to come. Shaped by 156 years (1841–1997) of British colonial influence, Fragrant Harbour has become a site of unique hybridity where cultures, identities, and everyday practices converge. In response to these conditions, we ask our students to investigate the city through a drawing process of giving and taking, movement and stillness, presence, and erasure. Co-created through graphite lines, their collective work emerged as they gathered to extract, discover, and redraw the Fragrant Harbour capriccio they inhabited.