Being International, Local and Chinese: Advertisements on the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway

Abstract

Advertising in Hong Kong draws on visual and linguistic resources from a number of overlapping cultural contexts, reflecting Hong Kong's multiple identities as an international, Chinese, Cantonese and post-colonial city. Examples of ads from the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway are examined to show how such resources may be deployed to create coherent bimodal and often bilingual texts. It is argued that the visual and linguistic resources in the ads can be interpreted as multiply coded, and different readings depend on interaction between the potential meanings in the texts and the meanings available to the readers from their own cultural contexts.