THE HANKOU CONCESSION AS A CULTURAL-GEOGRAPHIC FIELD: HISTORICAL VISUALIZATION PATHWAYS IN THE DOCUMENTARY THE ROAD TO HANKOU

บทคัดย่อ

Introduction: This study examines the Hankou concession as a cultural-geographic field through visual semiotics, using the documentary The Road to Hankou as both research object and creative practice. Grounded in Lotman’s semi sphere, it considers how architecture, public space, and everyday life encode cultural hybridity and how audiovisual narration can reactivate urban memory. Objective: (1) Decode the symbolic structures and cultural memory embedded in the concession’s urban spaces. (2) Investigate how documentary media translate spatial and symbolic features into dynamic audiovisual narratives. (3) Examine how The Road to Hankou functions as a living archive that reconstructs spatial identity and collective remembrance. Methods: A mixed, practice-based design integrates literature and archival review, field investigation in six representative blocks of Wuhan’s Jiang’an District, and interdisciplinary analysis across aesthetics, architecture, history, and sociology. Guided by cultural semiotics, the project develops and produces a 6–10-minute documentary, analyzing its script architecture, narrative strategies, image-sound design, and montage as semiotic units. Results: The concession emerges as a multilayered semi sphere in which buildings, street patterns, institutions, and daily rituals operate as visual signs of Chinese Western interaction. A triadic model “historical space–multivocal narrative visual symbolism” is identified as the documentary’s core translation pathway, employing spatial juxtaposition of archives and present-day footage, re-photography, and spatial sound to visualize temporal layers. The film re-assembles dispersed signs into a coherent, affective memory field, reshaping perceptions of urban identity. Conclusion: By bridging cultural geography, film theory, and heritage practice, the study proposes a transferable methodological framework for visualizing urban memory and interpreting hybrid historical spaces through documentary. It demonstrates documentary’s capacity to serve as a living archive that revitalizes forgotten urban histories, informs cultural communication, and supports heritage renewal.