Book excerpt: This book examines four contemporary sites of visual culture in East Asia through the poetic prism of the “ruinous garden.” Framing destroyed, discarded, and displaced material objects within a rhetoric of development and relating this to the experience of ethnic/national culture, the book presents succinct analyses of visual works, as well as cultural criticisms, centered on space in metropolitan Japan and Hong Kong, China. These analyses are placed in dialog with approaches from postcolonial texts, addressing development and fractures in representation. Additionally, the book suggests graphic design as a form of retrospective cultural thinking, encompassing visual and invisible modernity, as well as an attachment to disappearing space. Offering a unique and thorough analysis of Japanese visual culture, combining discussion on photography, installation art, and graphic design, as well as integrating material from Hong Kong visual culture in discussions of identity, this book will appeal to students and scholars of visual culture in East Asia, environmental art, and environmental humanities.