With rapid economic growth and immense living standard rise within less than one generation in the Global East, the material legacies of the Age of Imperialism have not only not been spurned, but popularly regarded as the source of progress and prosperity. In Shanghai, Concession-era global linkages have been appropriated to jump-start economic liberalization in the 1990s after decades of closed planned economy. ‘Old’ buildings such as those on the Bund have come to symbolize both the modern-era prosperity and their revival through their contemporary reuse. In Hong Kong, where British rule only ended in 1997, selected ‘historical’ buildings are not only regarded for their rarity in a prevalently demolition-driven urbanism, but have come to be embraced, representing amongst other things rule-of-law. This talk will zoom into the former Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, which has been converted into a arts and heritage hub known as Tai Kwun opening in 2018, and the redevelopment of the block around the former Royal Asiatic Society building in Shanghai, which has been converted into the Rockbund Art Museum in 2010, and unpack the processes and drivers that have facilitated the valuation of these ‘old’ buildings into cultural heritage, seeming to confound the prevalent decolonizing ‘etiquettes.’ Together with a case being probed at the moment from Singapore, that of the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings and converted into the National Gallery opening in 2015, the talk will examine the types of conversions, embraced positively as “adaptive reuse” and their meanings.

Ying Zhou is an architect and urban theorist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. Her research on the urban transformations of Shanghai, contextualizing contemporary developments in the institutional frameworks and historical legacies of the city, was published in the book Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Productions in Shanghai’s City Center in 2017. Her current research looks at how the burgeoning of art spaces manifest the shifts in the arts ecologies of East Asian cities, and their intersections with heritage conservation, architectural reuse, gentrification, and the rhetorics of creative cities. She is since 2023 an editor of Architectural Histories and chairs DocomomoHK. Her writings appear in Critical Planning, Topos, Urban China, Art Journal, artplus and she has exhibited at the Rotterdam Biennale, Swiss Architecture Museum and the Haus der Kunst, amongst others. Her curatorial team has been selected to represent Hong Kong at the Venice Biennale in 2025. She earned her BSE at Princeton, her MArch at Harvard, and her PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ).

Introduction by Lena Scheen, Director of the Center for Global Asia, Associate Professor of Global China Studies, NYU Shanghai; Global Network Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Science, NYU.