Writing on the Streets

It was late on a chilly March afternoon as I wandered through a small plaza near Houhai Lake in Beijing. The air was struggling to stay above freezing and I shivered in my spring jacket. Looking down, I noticed some Chinese characters drawn in water on the plaza’s grey paving stones. Whoever drew them was long gone; the cool air had kept them from evaporating.

I’d heard about water calligraphy before, but this was the first time I had seen it for myself. It’s a form of art that draws beauty from the ephemeral: like spoken words, these characters vanish into the air, their meaning lost to time and memory. It also says something about the futility of control. No matter how much you master your technique, no matter how well you squeeze these words into the form you want them to take, you are left with the same empty patch of stone you started with.

I’ve never heard of anyone doing water calligraphy in Hong Kong. For some reason, people here are much more inhibited in the way they use public space. Go to an open space in any given Chinese city and you’ll see a far greater range of activities than in a comparable place in Hong Kong. Go to Shenzhen’s Civic Square on a nice Sunday afternoon, for instance, and you’ll find people driving electric race cars, playing instruments, flying kites, riding bikes, doing water calligraphy, singing and dancing. There’s irony in the fact that people behave far more exuberantly in an authoritarian state than in an ostensibly free city.

That said, I did come across something in Hong Kong that reminded me of water calligraphy. In Man Ming Lane, just behind Exit C of the Yau Ma Tei MTR station, someone used white chalk to write a lengthy screed on the redbrick sidewalk. I saw it late one night and, since I live only 15 minutes away by foot, I returned the next day to photograph it. But most of the chalk had already been worn off and it was impossible to read most of what had been written.

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Macau Art Space: Ox Warehouse

Tucked away next to the slopes of the Colina de Mong-Há, halfway between the dog-racing track and the Red Market, the Ox Warehouse doesn’t call much attention to itself. But inside the slightly ramshackle quarters of this former cattle depot is one of the avant-garde spaces that are nurturing the arts in Macau.

Frank Lei Loi-fan has run the space since it opened in 2003. “At the time there wasn’t much going on,” he says. Few organizations existed to support Macau artists and not many artists were working full-time, especially not in the realm of contemporary art. So the Ox Warehouse began organizing exchanges between Macau and overseas artists. “Before, the Portuguese just had official galleries in the centre of town that showed artists who weren’t local,” he says. “Now we see that young people want to organize their own activities, ones that are closer to our local culture in Macau. Macau has a lot of people who like to take photos or to draw, but they needed to branch out and learn to absorb knowledge and experience from others.”

Macau’s art scene has always been fluid, with many artists coming from Portugal and other European countries, while local Chinese artists leave Macau to study overseas or on the mainland. After studying journalism, Lei moved to France, where he studied film and photography. When he returned, he first resisted joining an arts organization. “There’s too many cultural associations in Macau and they exist only to ask for money,” he says. But he realized that, without something to support local talent, Macau’s art scene would never develop.

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Two Cities’ Scale Models

Set in the seclusion of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, well inside the largest of New York’s outer boroughs, the Queens Museum of Art doesn’t attract the same blockbuster number of international visitors as the megamuseums and power galleries of Manhattan. That hardly means it fails to draw from cosmopolitan sources — in a borough as diverse as Queens, appealing to the local population means displaying art that speaks to many points of origin. But the museum is best known for a work of very local significance: the Panorama of the City of New York, a vast scale model of the five boroughs built on Robert Moses’ orders for the 1964 World’s Fair.

Despite an occasional lack of updates — including one twenty-some year gap — the Panorama has been kept fairly timely. Though the last comprehensive upgrade took place in 1992, sponsors can now adopt buildings and ensure the accuracy of a given plot on the map. There are some exceptions where updates are off limits; the museum preferred the World Trade Center towers remain standing rather than represent Ground Zero (they will be replaced when the new site’s new towers are completed). But by and large, the model is a decent representation of the city — precise enough to use for mapping geodata.

Last year, urban planner and artist Damon Rich did just that, taking advantage of the Panorama to detail the extent of home foreclosures in New York. Reasoning that, for many New Yorkers, the foreclosure crisis appeared to be something taking place in far-flung Sunbelt suburbs, his aim was to bring the extent of the national real estate debacle home to a city that didn’t yet seem to realize the problem had reached its front stoop.

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Rethinking Urban Renewal in Hong Kong

This is a feature story that was originally published in the July 2010 edition of Muse magazine. The photos accompanying this article were taken around the Graham Street Market in Central.

Standing in the soggy heat of a late spring afternoon, Katty Law reflected on the irony that it took a movie a mere two months to do what she has been fighting to achieve for two years. “We’ve been talking about Wing Lee Street for so long,” she said, looking up at a rusted balcony on this sleepy street in Sheung Wan. “But we couldn’t convince the government to save the whole street.”

That was before the makers of Echoes of the Rainbow picked the street — with its single row of tong laus built just before and after World War II — as the perfect backdrop for their weepy drama about a shoemaker’s family in 1960s Hong Kong. After the movie won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, dozens of photographers, schoolchildren and sightseers started visiting the narrow street, recording the details of an urban scene that has become nearly extinct in Hong Kong. As the crowd of pilgrims grew, heritage advocates raised their voices and a group of architects, engineers and urban planners joined in, urging the URA to preserve all of the buildings on Wing Lee Street.

Government officials were listening. In a surprise announcement, the Secretary for Development, Carrie Lam, announced that Wing Lee Street would be withdrawn from the urban renewal site. For Law, co-founder of the Central and Western District Concern Group, the announcement was only a temporary respite from the overall battle to persuade the government to rethink its entire approach to urban design. Her aim is to get the government to encourage development that is sensitive to the environment, that enhances the city’s streetlife and sense of community and that respects Hong Kong’s history and heritage. “Right now, developers can do whatever they want, and they’re facilitated by the government. We need planning controls,” she said.

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Need a Plumber?

In Hong Kong, like in many Asian cities, it’s common for contractors to advertise their services through graffiti. Forget Google — to find an electrician, a plumber or a cement specialist, just walk down the street and look at the phone numbers scrawled on utility boxes with magic marker or stencilled on walls with spray paint.

One plumber rises above the rest. Throughout Hong Kong, often in very unexpected places, you will encounter the same telephone number and neatly-written inscription: Tong Kui Jo Hau — “Unclogs drains, repairs pipes” — followed by a signature, Kui Wong, that translates roughly as “The King of Plumbing.”

Who is this king plumber who paints on walls with such care and patience? Does he carry a can of paint when he gets called out for a job, just in case he stumbles across a particularly enticing wall? I’m not sure I want to find out — it would spoil the romance of drainage royalty decorating the city under cover of night.

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How to Lose a Sense of Place

You can’t touch the sculpture in front of Langham Place. It’s a nice bronze piece by Larry Bell, and it looks great from a distance, but if people touched it, their oily hands would ruin the metal. So there’s a security guard stationed out front, all day, every day, to make sure nobody crawls onto the sculpture’s tree-like limbs, which, most cruel of all, seem to invite you to climb them, or at least lean on them.

Since it opened five years ago, Langham Place has become one of the most recognizable landmarks in Mongkok. Its 700-foot office tower, capped by a glowing dome, can be seen from throughout the city, including my kitchen and bedroom windows, where I take strange comfort in its constant presence. The mall underneath is home to an independent radio station and a huge, unforgettable atrium ringed by outdoor café terraces. The last adjective I would use to describe Langham Place is “bland,” which can’t be said for most malls.

The way Langham Place treats the streets around it is another story. The entire complex occupies two narrow city blocks, connected by large enclosed footbridges above street level. One block is home to the office tower and shopping mall; the other contains a luxury hotel, minibus terminus and community centre. As you’d expect from such large buildings sandwiched onto such small blocks, the effect is that of a tunnel — you’re walking down the street past buildings of varying height and suddenly the sun disappears, the wind blows harder and you’re surrounded by huge, featureless walls. Whereas the interior of the mall is memorable and engaging, its exterior is a triumph of commercial gigantism.

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Saving an Historic Site — Then What?

When Cynthia Lee Hong-yee found out that her family planned to sell her grandfather’s private garden to developers, she returned from the United States to take photos of the lush greenery and eclectic Western-influenced Chinese architecture.

“I was capturing some of the details and I realized I just couldn’t capture Dragon Garden’s greatness,” she said. “It has to be experienced.”

She realized the garden needed to be saved — and it was up to her to do it. After a contentious battle with the relatives who owned the garden, Lee managed to persuade her uncle, Lee Shiu, to save it from redevelopment by purchasing it from his brothers and nephews for HK$100 million. The plan, after that, was to donate the garden to the government, which would then open it to the public.

That was in 2006. Since then, the garden, which is located on the shores of the Rambler Channel just west of Sham Tseng, has sat in limbo, free from the threat of demolition but with no concrete plans to restore it and open it to the public. The Lees’ original offer to donate the garden was rebuffed by the government. It later changed tack and said it could take over the site, but would not guarantee how it would be used in the future.

As Hong Kong debates how best to preserve its heritage, the case of Dragon Garden poses a question that has proved surprisingly hard to answer: once you’ve saved an historic site, what do you do with it?

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Postering in Montreal: Legal at Last

Stapling a poster to a Saint-Viateur hydro pole

A Quebec Court of Appeal judge has ruled that Montreal’s anti-postering bylaw, which prohibits posters from being stuck to public street furniture, violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Montreal will now have to find a way to legally accommodate posters on public property.

We have local activist Jaggi Singh to thank for this ruling. Ten years ago, he was charged with sticking a poster on municipal property, and with the help of civil rights lawyer Julius Grey, he took his case through the court system. He was finally acquitted last week. The implications for Montreal are profound: independent musicians, artists, community groups and political movements, who have faced thousands of dollars in fines for sticking posters on lampposts and hydro poles, are now free to do what they’ve been doing for years.

Bengali poster, Park Extension

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Hey, Rialto!

The Rialto Theatre is located on the corner of rue Bernard and avenue du Parc, in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. It was built in 1924 and was one of thousands of ornate movie theatres built in North America at the turn of the century, at a time when films were first entering the mainstream.

These theatres were called movie palaces — a fitting title as they were defined by an over-the-top ornamental aesthetic that evoked old world grandeur. Think limestone balustrades, wrought iron railings, gold molding and red velvet curtains. Most of the movie palaces in the 1920s were built to pay homage to architectural monuments in Europe. The Rialto itself was styled after the Paris Opera House by Montreal architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy. It has been designated as a heritage site by all three levels of government and is considered by its residents to be as much a part of the fabric of Mile End as its bagel shops, cafes and madcap personalities.

The Rialto has stood mostly vacant for the past few years, while its owner, Elias Kalogeras, looked for buyers. Kalogeras had owned the theatre since 1983. During this time it underwent a number of transformations. He purchased the Rialto with hopes of turning it into a mini-Eaton Centre, but the Ministry of Culture intervened and his plans never materialized. Since then it has been a nightclub, a concert venue, a repertory theatre, and a steakhouse. Kalogeras was confronted with many of the problems owners of defunct movie palaces faced: the difficulty of successfully filling such a cavernous space while maintaining the charm of a historic building and keeping it updated to the needs of contemporary society.

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The Art of Personal Space

In New York, bulging sidewalks have led to the partial pedestrianization of Times Square and plans for something similar along teeming 34th St. In Cairo, fed up pedestrians often take matters into their own hands, competing with cars to form express lanes off the sidewalks of window-shopping meccas like Talaat Harb. And anyone navigating a busy scramble crossing like the one just outside Tokyo’s Shibuya station might feel like an extra in Braveheart, surging into battle against the horde on the opposing corner.

Ever since the concept of “personal space” was first coined in the late 1960s, the increasing density of the world’s rapidly urbanizing population has meant that it’s gone largely forgotten or ignored. Now, two artists on two different continents are fighting back — in a manner of speaking. As a Digital Arts postgraduate at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand, Nathan Destro created a “personal space protector” to keep strangers at a distance.

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Plus ça change…

Kate McDonnell pointed the way to some Flickr photos recently uploaded by Michel Gravel, a photojournalist for La Presse whose career has spanned more than 40 years. Many of the photos are street scenes from Montreal in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What amazes me is how Montreal’s essential character has remained intact despite the fact that it has changed in so many ways — physically, demographically, linguistically, politically — in the past few decades.

The above photo of people lining up to board a bus in a winter snowstorm is a perfect example. When I noticed that the bus was the 80 — the same bus I took up and down Park Avenue every day for years — I started looking for clues as to where on Park Avenue the photo was taken. None of the signs were familiar, nor were the two buildings on the left. After a few seconds, though, I recognized the building in the middle distance as the block at the corner of Park and Bernard, home to Cheskie’s and the dépanneur where I bought newspapers, beer and monthly transit passes. The buildings on the left have been radically made over, but the three businesses visible in the photo — a hardware store, a restaurant and the corner dep — remain, just with different names and owners.

Gravel captured other scenes that are instantly recognizable today: orthodox Jews walking around Mile End, laundry hanging heavily over a laneway, L. Berson and Son’s tombstone workshop, riots, fires, people sweating it out during a heatwave, the dépanneur tricycle.

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Locals vs. Tourists

Montreal

We’ve always known there is a gulf between the city as experienced by tourists and the city lived in by locals. Now we have a fun visual representation of that divide. Using various types of data from Flickr, one user of the photo-sharing website, Eric Fisher, has created maps that indicate the spots photographed by tourists and those shot by locals. Local photographs are blue, tourist photos red and undetermined photos yellow.

There are some problems in the methodology. Whether a Flickr user is a local or a tourist is determined by whether they photograph a given location over a long period of time (like a local would) or in just a few days (like a tourist would). That seems fair enough, but not everyone geotags their photos, which could possibly skew the results one way or another. One person who obsessive geotags all of his or her photos could have a disproportionately large representation on the map. You can see this in Vancouver, where one person’s geotagged cycle routes are prominently displayed.

Still, just by looking at the maps you get a strong intuitive sense that they are close to reality. In the Montreal map, tourists overwhelmingly stick to Old Montreal, St. Joseph’s Oratory and the Olympic Stadium while locals take photos throughout downtown and the Plateau, with an especially notable cluster of local shots around Lafontaine Park, Maisonneuve Park and the Botanical Gardens (which, interestingly enough, are right across the street from the Olympic tourist hub).

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Closed for the Night

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Saved from the Scrapyard

Portions of the old Warshaw and Simcha’s signs on display at the 2007 Main Madness street fair

I wrote a bit about Montreal signs a few years ago, including the memorable Logo Cities project, ghost signs, street signs and the fight to save the Farine Five Roses sign. Montreal’s linguistic diversity, penchant for kitsch and urban palimpsest have given it an exceptionally rich signscape.

Unfortunately, a decade of renewal and redevelopment have done away with some of the city’s most interesting signs. Farine Five Roses might have been saved, and the Guaranteed Milk Bottle restored (and re-graffiti-ed), but the signs that disappeared from the landscape include the St. James’ Church neon sign, the Warshaw sign and the magnificent Simcha’s sign (which you can see above in one of our title graphics).

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