Excavating the Present

In the most remote corner of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale’s West Kowloon site, three architects, Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone and Daniel Patzold, are digging up Hong Kong’s heritage from virgin land. The concept: it’s several centuries into the future and an old street market has been discovered, leading to an archaeological race to save what remains of it.

Artifacts from the Central street market are scattered around the dig, including an old green market booth the team brought in from Gutzlaff Street. It now sits incongruously in an open plain with the giant glass-and-stall wall of the just-built International Commerce Centre rising incongruously behind it.

“When something like this is in the market, you don’t notice because it’s a shitty old thing, but when you move it here, you start seeing all of the details. There’s a lot of stories here,” says Johnstone. “If we found an old market 350 years in the future, we would want to preserve and protect the ruins. Why not today for the markets that still exist?”

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Hong Kong’s Wild West

Last Sunday, Clara Lee and her nine-year-old daughter Hoi-ching were wandering through the craggy grass and gnarly trees that make up the West Kowloon site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.

“It’s big here!” exclaimed Hoi-ching. “I don’t often go to the countryside.”

“Actually,” said her mother, “this is not the countryside. We’re in the city.”

Hoi-ching looked up, perplexed. “But it feels like the country.”

She could be excused for being mistaken. After it was created from landfill fifteen years ago, parts of West Kowloon were developed with malls and highrises, while a narrow strip of waterfront was recently converted into a public park and promenade. But most of it was simply fenced off and left fallow; land reclaimed from the sea was gradually reclaimed by nature. With the totems of Hong Kong finance soaring at either end of the site, it’s an odd experience to wander along a dirt road past wild grass, untamed shrubs and the sound of crickets buzzing in the sun.

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Hydro Pole Art

I found these plaques attached to a few hydro poles on Esplanade Avenue between Bernard and Saint-Viateur. I like how the copper plate etchings are a mischievous response to the official Hydro-Québec plates that are normally found on the poles. The wood one is striking for the way it mimics the natural texture of the pole, right down to the staples. As street art moves beyond the conventional media of paint, posters and stickers, it will be interesting to see it take on more unusual forms like this.

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Bring Your Own Chair

Good street furniture is not one of Hong Kong’s strengths, so when people here can’t find a place to sit outdoors, they do the most logical thing: they bring their own chair.

In natural gathering spots around the city you’ll come across a motley array of household chairs that have been placed outdoors and tied to a post or railing. You can see them at bench-less bus stops, or on steep stairways, sometimes with one leg trimmed so the chair can sit evenly on the steps. I’ve even come across chairs tied to trees in the woods that are never more than a 15 or 20 minute walk from any part of the city.

In the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, which runs until the end of February on a piece of vacant waterfront land, designers Rosly Mok and Vanessa Chan have created a public bench out of discarded chairs.

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Under the Wrecking Ball’s Shadow

There is not much to indicate that the rundown shophouse on Shanghai Street in Mongkok houses anything but a pawn shop.

On the third floor, however, is Tong Saam, an unmarked space that has positioned itself on Hong Kong’s creative vanguard. Since it was opened earlier this year by three friends interested in music and art, it has hosted film screenings and performances by underground folk singers such a Beijing’s Zhao Yiran.

“Normally, you’d only be able to find this kind of space in an industrial area,” says one of Tong Saam’s founders, Charlie Wong Liang-yih, a freelance designer. “It’s the perfect size and even has a balcony. Being in Mong Kok makes it even more special because it’s so central and we’re part of a real neighbourhood. Places like the Cattle Depot [Artists' Village in To Kwa Wan] are like warehouses for artists. This is more like a community space.”

For all its ambitions, though, Tong Saam might soon be redeveloped. Shortly after they moved in, Wong and his partners heard rumours that the Urban Renewal Authority was planning a new project on the street. Even if that did not turn out to be the case, it was likely that other URA projects in the area would drive up prices and encourage owners to sell their properties to developers, he said. “We’re surrounded by redevelopment projects,” Wong said.

Tong Saam is not the only new venture to open in a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment.

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Dreaming of the Sustainable City

When the curators of the 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale began assembling exhibits for the urbanism and architecture showcase, they decided to focus on the theme of sustainability. It turns out that most of the artists, architects and designers who answered their call for submissions had the same idea.

“It’s almost a zeitgeist,” says Eric Schuldenfrei, one of the biennale’s four curators. “When you ask people for new work, the dialogue with nature is very strong. It might be subtle, but if you look for it, there is that element in almost every project in the biennale. It’s curated to an extent, but it’s also what everyone was already working on.”

Sustainability might be a buzzword, but the philosophy behind it goes far beyond a bit of greenery here and there. A scan of the biennale’s lengthy roster of exhibitions, installations, lectures and events shows a preoccupation with the question of how to reduce Hong Kong’s impact on the environment and bring city-dwellers back into contact with nature.

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Paving in Portuguese

Ten years after its handover to the People’s Republic of China, the old Portuguese colony of Macau hardly abounds with the tongue of its former master. Portuguese signs still cling to shops and older buildings, but the language of the streets is unmistakeably Cantonese — with the occasional whiff of Mandarin coming from the direction of mainland tour groups. Macau’s future, its leaders have decided, is as a gambling destination, and increasing numbers of visitors from across Asia pack its Vegas-brand hotels night and day.

But the enclave’s Lusitanian design vocabulary remains remarkably intact, and nowhere is this more evident than in the patterns that swirl beneath its pedestrians’ feet. Calçadas (literally “pavements”), the unique street mosaics that decorate the cities of Portugal and its former colonies from Lisbon to Luanda.

The origins of calçadas are somewhat unclear. The popularity of tiles in Portuguese art first exploded with the introduction of geometrical ceramic arts by the Moors. Decorated tilework, known in Portuguese as azulejo, soon came to cover houses and churches across the country. But the first recorded calçada was not the product of an artist’s whimsy, but as a makework project for prisoners thought up by an army officer.

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Display Case

A ground floor window, if it’s close enough to the sidewalk, is the perfect vehicle for self-expression. When I was growing up in Calgary, I would walk along 17th Avenue every day, passing by an apartment window that was festooned with anti-war posters, music stickers and various other countercultural emblems. In Montreal, at the corner of Napoleon and Hôtel de Ville, this window is filled with a much more eclectic array of things.

A Detour in Hong Kong

This might be an odd thing to say about Hong Kong, but the place lacks spontaneity. For all of its hustle and intensity, it’s awfully beholden to routine: every day, the same street markets, the same packed MTR trains, the same carnival of consumerism. Even the political protests, though frequent, are quite orderly, almost choreographed.

So thank goodness for things like Detour, a new art and design festival that is headquartered at the old Married Police Quarters, a wonderful 1950s-era housing block (home to Hong Kong’s chief executive in his early years) that was once home to police families and is now empty and abandoned. Just a few years ago, it was meant to be sold and redeveloped, but it has now been preserved and earmarked for creative uses like Detour.

Detour is run by the Ambassadors of Design, a well-funded group whose stated mission is to make Hong Kong into a more creative city; among the events it organizes are Pecha Kucha Night, Cut and Paste and the Business of Design Week.

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Hey You, Hurry Up

Street art on Duluth and St. Viateur streets, Montreal

Making of a Square

Place Gérald-Godin in 1979 and 2009. Compilation by Guillaume St-Jean

Over the past decade, Montreal has invested heavily in big-ticket squares and plazas, including the remarkable Place Jean-Paul Riopelle and redesigned Victoria Square, both completed in 2003, and the surprisingly successful Place des Festivals, which opened earlier this year. But some of the smaller new squares are just as impressive, perhaps doubly so for the fact that they’ve been perfectly integrated into the city’s life without any kind of the fuss or introspection demanded by their bigger counterparts.

Place Gérald-Godin is the best example of these small new squares. It sits just outside the sole entrance to Mont-Royal metro, one of the city’s busiest stations, and as a result it’s busy throughout the day. Until recently, however, it wasn’t so much a square as a patch of grass traversed by a couple of asphalt pathways. A building that housed a caisse populaire (and before that, a bicycle shop) occupied the corner of Berri and Mount Royal, next to the station, making the space in front feel like more like an afterthought than a real place.

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Vive la crise!

Montreal doesn’t seem to have been hit terribly hard by this latest crise économique, maybe because it has spent most of the recent past recovering from a string of much more substantial crises. At the very least, it has given us a break from the excesses of the previous years, a time to reflect on what had been going on. Some of the economic victims of the crisis, like the misguided Griffintown redevelopment project, are better off dead.

In any case, I enjoyed seeing the Berlin-based French artist SP-38’s “Vive la crise!” posters around town. (He’s also responsible for an earlier spate of posters that read “Vive la bourgeoisie!” and “Vive la poésie!”) It’s a childish, contrarian exclamation, but it rings true to our instincts that the current season of change and contemplation is maybe, in some ways, a bit better than the blind exuberance of before.

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Election Sign Season

Not an election sign, but much more amusing

I arrived in Montreal just in time for the most exciting municipal election campaign in decades. All at once, a bit too early for Halloween, all of City Hall’s skeletons fell out of the closet, with revelations that construction contracts are rigged and accusations that the municipal government works primarily around a system of bribes and kickbacks. From what I saw, though, this year’s campaign posters are not nearly so dramatic.

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Nightfall

Wan Chai

Causeway Bay

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