September 29th, 2011
Though street art is not as pervasive in Hong Kong as it is in European and North American cities, it is very common in certain neighbourhoods. Sheung Wan is one of them. In the district’s many back lanes and quiet streets, just about every spare surface is covered with a tag, stencil or poster.
Last March, I wandered through the area and recorded some of what I saw. It’s very much a reflection of Hong Kong’s current state of mind. One of the pieces depicts a jasmine hawker selling jasmine flowers, a reference to both the Arab Spring and the response of Chinese activists to the increasingly harsh crackdown on mainland China intellectuals, human rights lawyers and dissidents. Another criticizes the Hong Kong government’s aloofness and unaccountability. One pokes fun at the ascendant Chinese art market, which has led to the concentration of major international galleries and auction houses in Hong Kong.
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September 27th, 2011
When I first came to Hong Kong, one of the most perplexing of park rules was “No hanging of laundry.” Surely that isn’t a problem, I thought. Do people really bring their wet laundry to the park to dry?
As it turns out, they do. Though most people here have a washing machine in their apartments, relatively few have dryers, and Hong Kong’s tiny apartments lack the outdoor space needed to effectively dry freshly-washed clothes. Some people take their laundry up to rooftop clotheslines; those who live in buildings without an accessible roof simply hang their clothes next to an open window, hoping they won’t get that awful damp smell that comes from taking too long to dry. Others take a different approach: they dry their laundry in public space, hanging it on sidewalk railings and chainlink fences.
This happens almost exclusively in public housing estates and working-class neighbourhoods, which is an important point to consider. Outdoor clothes-drying is seen by many of the world’s middle and upper classes to be distasteful and unsightly, from North America, where hundreds of communities ban the practice, to Hong Kong, where affluent people cling very tightly to symbols of affluence and class identity, perhaps because they are only a generation or two removed from poverty. Once, a middle-aged professional man I know was looking outside at a luxury apartment tower when he noticed that some apartments had clothes drying outside, on the building’s small balconies. “They’re rich but they still dry their clothes outside,” he said with evident distaste.
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September 22nd, 2011
Imagine it’s a beautiful autumn day in Hong Kong. The summer’s humidity has vanished and you’re out enjoying the fine weather, bicycling along Victoria Harbour. You pass the Star Ferry pier, the new government headquarters at Tamar, then Victoria Park, all the while gazing out at the jade green water.
That was the vision presented by a group of cycling advocates at the Harbourfront Commission on September 7th. The Hong Kong Cycling Alliance is urging the commission to include a 16-kilometre cycleway in its plans for a continuous public promenade along the shoreline of Victoria Harbour. Its members argue that cycling would enliven the waterfront while also creating an easy way to travel between its different nodes of activity.
“Cycling is the most convenient, efficient mode of transportation known to man — and it’s just right for the harbourfront, which we want to be peaceful and well-connected,” says Martin Turner, a member of the Cycling Alliance. “I can see a family going there and hiring bikes for an afternoon. And commuters won’t have to sit on a bus for 45 minutes at the start of the morning. They can get some fresh air and improve their health.”
Turner and other cycling advocates hope that giving bikes a place on the waterfront could encourage cycling not only as a recreational activity but as a convenient way to get around the city. That would bring Hong Kong into line with cities as diverse as Hangzhou, New York and Paris, where cycling has become increasingly popular — and where local governments enthusiastically promote it as a healthy, ecologically-friendly form of transport.
“Our goal is to make cycling a part of everyday life in Hong Kong,” says Cycling Alliance member Philip Heung. For that to happen, though, cycling advocates must face the mother of all obstacles: changing government policy, which does not consider bicycles a means of transportation, even as cycling appears to grow more popular in both the New Territories and the urban areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.
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September 10th, 2011
Street performer on Sai Yeung Choi Street, Mongkok
Hong Kong is rich in visual symbols: a glittering skyline, red market lamps, green trams. But when you close your eyes and think of Hong Kong, what do you hear? That’s what Lawal Marafa, a professor of geography at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is trying to figure out by studying Hong Kong’s soundscape.
Together with another CUHK professor, Lam Kin-che, Marafa is trying to chart Hong Kong’s sounds and identify those that people like the most, with the goal of making the city a more tolerable place to live. It all comes down to the issue of noise pollution: the cacophony of roaring buses, endless jackhammering and mobile phone chatter that seems to dominate so much of Hong Kong. Instead of trying to make everything quieter, Marafa hopes that particularly pleasant sounds can be isolated and used to design better parks and urban spaces.
He points to Diamond Hill’s Nan Lian Garden as an example of how sound can be used to mask noise. Located next to Lung Chung Road, one of Kowloon’s busiest thoroughfares, the Tang Dynasty-style garden makes abundant use of fountains and waterfalls to fight the din of traffic. Even though the environment is still loud, says Marafa, the sound of rushing water puts people at ease, whereas the sound of traffic stresses them out.
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September 10th, 2011
“Tribute in Light,” a September 11th memorial, seen from Brooklyn.
Photo by Chris Arnade
It’s almost Mid-Autumn Festival here in Hong Kong, a time of year when people gather outside to light lanterns and stare up at the full harvest moon. As with all Chinese festivals, there’s a story behind it — in this case, a woman is said to have swallowed a pill of immortality and found herself stranded on the moon, which happens to be home to a rabbit — but mainly it’s an excuse for families to play outdoors at a time when they’d normally be watching TV at home.
Mid-Autumn always reminds me of another story, which comes from the Logo Cities project a few years back. Late on a winter night, a young man was out in downtown Montreal when he remarked upon an exceptionally low-hanging moon, only to realize a second later that it was actually the corporate logo on the top of the Complexe Desjardins. The same thing happened to me when I was in Montreal earlier this summer — “Wow, the moon is low tonight,” I thought. There’s something about the white and green colours of the logo that is surprisingly lunar.
There’s always a lot of talk about the way that urban light pollution obscures the night sky. Looking up at night, I’m lucky to see a few stars, but at this latitude, I should be able to see the entire sweep of the Milky Way. Instead, there’s the moon — and all the artificial sources of light that serve as false moons. Sometimes, when the sky is exceptionally hazy, the sun is so weak that it, too, begins to resemble the moon, small and weak enough to stare at with the naked eye.
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September 7th, 2011
It was the perfect setting for a picnic. Under the shade of a few trees, next to the sloshing waves of the East Lamma Channel, we set down a blanket, some wine and some snacks and spent an afternoon watching the ships pass by. What more could we ask for?
How about a waterfall? Oh, and some World War II ruins. And a resting spot for Chinese gods. And to be able to get there from Causeway Bay in less than twenty minutes.
Not only does Waterfall Bay have all of this, it’s one of the most peaceful places you can go without venturing more than five minutes from the nearest bus stop, Wellcome or 7-Eleven.
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September 2nd, 2011
2010 was a good year for Muse magazine. Three years after its launch, its mix of long features, short fiction and cultural criticism had earned it respect as one of Hong Kong’s most insightful cultural journals. It was sponsoring public lectures, film screenings and a search for Hong Kong’s up-and-coming cultural talents. In September, it made its first real foray into the digital world by launching an iPad edition.
So it came as a surprise when publisher Frank Proctor announced, at the end of the year, that the December edition would be Muse’s last.
“I didn’t see it coming,” says Leo Lee Ou-fan, a scholar of modern Chinese literature who wrote a regular column for Muse. “Muse had become Hong Kong’s representative to the outside world, but the sad part is that right at the point where it was being noticed, Frank couldn’t afford to continue.”
Three months later, another well-respected magazine, C for Culture, published its last issue. Both magazines had suffered from the same simple fate: they ran out of money. Loyal readers and cultural observers were left wondering: does Hong Kong have what it takes to support lively coverage of the arts? And without that coverage, can Hong Kong ever develop a mature artistic and intellectual culture?
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August 30th, 2011
Yue Hwa in 2005. Photo by choco_late
The Yue Hwa Chinese Products department store has stood at the corner of Jordan and Nathan roads for decades — and for decades, so did its big neon sign, a sentinel that marked the passage north into the seedy streets of Yau Ma Tei and Mong Kok.
Sometime in 2009, though, without fanfare or even the simplest of announcements, the sign was removed. So was a similar sign further down Nathan Road. Yue Hwa did not respond to inquiries about the signs’ fate. It is not clear why they were taken down or what happened to them.
Heritage activists were nonplussed about the sign’s disappearance. “We put our priority on conserving some historical buildings first due to limited resources,” says Roy Ng, policy officer at the Conservancy Association, which has fought to save numerous historic buildings from destruction.
Katty Law, a heritage activist who successfully lobbied against the redevelopment of the Central Market and Former Married Police Quarters, says she has “never thought about the issue, probably because many of us are upset with the light pollution problem.”
Although neon signs are some of the most characteristic elements of Hong Kong’s streetscape, there has been virtually no effort to research, document or preserve the city’s landmark them. In terms of heritage conservation, they simply aren’t on the radar.
“Neon signs are such a surprisingly under-researched subject,” says Lee Ho-yin, director of the University of Hong Kong’s Architectural Conservation Programme. “We see them every day and yet we don’t know much about them.”
With more and more businesses switching to cheaper, mass-produced forms of signage, neon is steadily disappearing from Hong Kong’s streets. The effect on Hong Kong’s visual identity could be profound. Neon is such an integral part of Hong Kong’s character that the mere mention of the city’s name conjures up images of glowing Chinese characters and streets bathed in a rainbow of light.
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August 18th, 2011
No cycling. No ball-playing. No gambling. No remote-controlled vehicles. No walking on the grass. No fun. Hong Kong’s public parks are burdened by so many rules, they end up discouraging the very thing that parks are meant to provide: an escape from the many stresses of urban life.
The same is true for many of the city’s other public spaces, from sidewalks to plazas and the ubiquitous “sitting-out areas” found in every neighbourhood. Caught in a stranglehold of metal fences, filled with concrete and ugly tile walls, they seem to discourage the lingering and spontaneous interaction that is cultivated by good public space.
In response, Hong Kong people make their own public space. Throughout the city, leftover bits of concrete and greenery have been claimed by citizens and transformed, through piecemeal intervention and crafty ingenuity, into lively, informal gathering spots.
Not far from my apartment in jam-packed Mongkok is a place I like to call the Hill With No Name. I call it this because, as far as I can tell, it has been overlooked by the gods of toponymy: it’s simply a small hill that was never developed, save for an underground reservoir and the Tsung Tsin Primary School. Even my friend Olivia, who grew up nearby and who attended the school as a kid, was stumped when I asked her what the hill was called. “I always just call it the hill behind Tsung Tsin,” she said.
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July 28th, 2011
Hong Kong’s market booths are typically painted green
Why is Hong Kong so green?
The question came up a couple of months ago when I was having afternoon tea with my girlfriend, Laine, at Mido Café.
“If you had to pick a color to associate with Hong Kong, what would it be?” she asked, looking out the window at Temple Street hawkers setting up for the night.
“I dunno,” I said. “Red?”
“That’s what most people would say, right? But I think it’s green. Not just because of the hills or the trees, but because so many things in the city are painted green, like the street market stalls.”
It was an interesting observation. A few weeks later, I brought it up when I met Hulu Culture co-founder and old Hong Kong expert Simon Go for coffee — also, coincidentally, at Mido Café. He immediately perked up.
“I call this color ‘grassroots green,’” he said, gazing up at Mido’s 1950s-era metal window frames which were, of course, painted green. “The windows, the market stalls, the trams, the Star Ferry. It’s everywhere, in all of the most famous Hong Kong things.”
But why? Go didn’t know for sure. He speculated that the government required market stalls to be painted green as a measure of consistency. I got the same answer from the owner of a paint shop on Wellington Street, in the middle of Hong Kong’s oldest street market.
“The hawkers come here to buy their paint and they choose from a few different shades of green,” he said. “I think it has to do with government policy.”
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July 10th, 2011
It’s a bright Sunday afternoon and Central is buzzing. Thousands of Filipino domestic workers gather with friends for a weekly picnic. Shoppers stream through the luxury shops of Chater House to the somewhat less posh confines of Worldwide House, where large boxes of gifts are being packed for shipment to the Philippines. Charity workers stop passersby to ask for donations.
Hong Kong is famous for this kind of vigorous streetlife — except in this case, none of it is happening on the street, but instead one or two stories above ground, on the network of footbridges and elevated open areas that link many of Central’s shopping malls and office towers.
It isn’t just happening in Central. In dozens of spots around the city, from Tsuen Wan to Tseung Kwan O, footbridges and underpasses are creating pedestrian networks that extend well beyond the traditional domain of the sidewalk and public square. In the words of one architect, Hong Kong has entered into a “condition of groundlessness,” in which the ground has become just one of many layers of public activity.
The phenomenon has become so pervasive that, in many parts of Hong Kong, vast networks of interconnected malls, office towers and residential buildings have become the main form of pedestrian passage. It is possible to walk from Pacific Place Three, on the western edge of Wan Chai, all the way to the Macau Ferry Terminal in Sheung Wan — a distance of more than two kilometres — without once setting foot at street level.
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July 6th, 2011
University of Hong Kong Democracy Wall, 2009
When I first moved to Hong Kong three years ago, I was already accustomed to the particular quirks of local life, having spent around two and a half months exploring the city before I took the definitive flight from Canada. Getting used to life at the University of Hong Kong was another story.
No student bars, no lively campus media, no earnest political actions — student life in Hong Kong seemed remarkably dull compared to what I had gotten used to in Montreal. Travels around Asia suggested this was a uniquely Hong Kong problem, because the university campuses I visited in Taipei, Seoul, Beijing and Bangkok all had the kind of spark I normally associate with student life.
I don’t mean to be unfair to Hong Kong students. Some universities — the Chinese University in particular — have a strong activist tradition. But the atmosphere seems less concerned with intellectual engagement than with career advancement, and you’re far more likely to see a black-suited business student advertising a marketing conference than you are to see a fresh-faced, scruffy-haired animal-rights advocate promoting free vegan lunches next to the cafeteria.
What makes this especially perplexing is that, over the past few years, we’ve heard a lot about Hong Kong’s so-called Post-80s Generation, a new wave of young political and cultural activists who are leading a campaign to make Hong Kong a more equitable, democratic and conscientious place. This generation certainly does exist — you saw it in the lively protests against the high-speed rail link to the mainland, in the movement to support Ai Wei Wei and again in the resurgent July 1st pro-democracy march — but it seems only to represent a small minority of young people in Hong Kong.
If anything, student apathy has reached new heights in Hong Kong, with student unions at three of the city’s seven universities unable to elect executive councils earlier this year. This spring, on assignment for the South China Morning Post, I went to one of Hong Kong’s newest schools, City University, to find out what was going on.
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June 29th, 2011
In Hong Kong, the fate of an old building is virtually predetermined. Worn by years of intense use and little maintenance, it is snatched up by a property developer who waits for the right moment to knock it down and replace it with shoebox apartments, or maybe a cookie-cutter hotel.
Carl Gouw wants to break that pattern. When the young property developer purchased an old building in Wan Chai, he planned to eventually demolish it for a new block of serviced apartments. But that might not happen for two or three years. In the meantime, he thought, why not do something out of the ordinary?
So the Wan Chai Visual Archive was born. Upstairs, twelve renovated apartments rented to long-stay visitors and expatriates. Downstairs, a bar that serves as a neighbourhood gathering space. And in between, a non-profit, community-oriented space for art and design that is subsidized by rent from the commercial and residential units.
“The idea is to bring an element of creativity into the serviced apartment business,” says Gouw. “Instead of just being passive as a property investor and doing nothing with the building until redevelopment, we thought we could create a platform to engage the local culture.”
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June 19th, 2011
Top: 1970s. Bottom: 2011. Photo by Lee Chi-man
It’s always easy to depict a city’s changes through the broadest of strokes. Buildings fall so that others may rise; new roads are built; shops come and go. But the most important transformations are often the most subtle.
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