MEDIUM: Map, Poster, Infographic, Data Visualization
DESCRIPTION:
This map, Lyricscape of Hong Kong, intertwines the city’s geography with the poetic essence of Cantonese lyrics. By geo-locating lyrical references from iconic Cantonese songs, the map reveals how music captures emotional and spatial connections to the city’s districts, landmarks, and daily life. Yellow lyric snippets float across a dark basemap, tracing a cultural landscape where memory, melody, and place converge. This project invites viewers to experience Hong Kong not just through sight, but through the rhythm of local voices and songs that have shaped its collective identity.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT:
As someone who deeply enjoys listening to Cantonese songs, I’ve always been struck by how powerfully lyrics evoke a sense of place. This project is my first attempt to visualize what I call a topophilic imagination—a romantic attachment to place—through cartography. Each lyric chosen for this map is geographically anchored in Hong Kong, from iconic spots like Victoria Harbour to ordinary places made poetic through song. By mapping these lyrics, I hope to show how music preserves emotional geographies, memories, nostalgia, belonging, and how these can be represented spatially. The map becomes not just a visualization of physical space, but of emotional resonance layered atop the urban landscape. As a cartographer and GIS student, I’m constantly exploring how maps can tell more than scientific or spatial truths, they can also tell personal and cultural stories. This work blends geography, language, and music to create a narrative map that invites viewers to not only see Hong Kong, but to feel it through the lens of shared memory and melody.