December 13th, 2009
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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November 27th, 2009
http://www.vimeo.com/6373774
Every evening, Sai Yeung Choi Street becomes a parade of shoppers, street performers and promoters that lasts until after midnight. There are few other places in the world where you come into such close proximity with so many people, but contact is fleeting: a bumped elbow, a wayward glance, a shared moment while watching a busker.
Videographer Thomas Lee exploited Sai Yeung Choi Street’s ephemeral nature in his video “A Door to Anywhere,” pulling aside people to ask them a simple question: “If you had a door that opened to anywhere at all, where would you go?” It’s a cute conceit taken from Doraemon, the Japanese anime, where the “dokodemo door” allows its characters to be instantly transported anywhere.
The answers that Lee gets are funny, surprising and poignant. For a few seconds, we get a glimpse of who these strangers are, before they wave goodbye and disappear back into the crowd.
October 20th, 2009
The basement of a shopping mall is the last place you’d expect to find the stirrings of a revolution, but that’s exactly what is happening in a tiny studio on the bottom floor of Langham Place. For the past year, Radio Dada has been dishing up indie music and irreverent discussion about Hong Kong arts and culture. Not only is this volunteer-run operation Hong Kong’s only independent radio station, its internet-based approach finally breaks free of the shackles that bind Hong Kong’s airwaves.
“Radio Dada is an experiment on how to build a radio station in Hong Kong,” says rapper and graffiti writer MC Yan, who is also the station’s musical director. “People are surprised that we do it without any money. But it’s not about money. It’s about freedom. Hong Kong is full of self-censorship, it’s way worse than in China. People here have no guts and no balls. We’re here to fix that.”
Despite Hong Kong’s reputation as a bastion of free expression, it’s actually illegal to run an independent radio station here. Only three radio stations — two of them commercial, one run by the government — are allowed to broadcast over the air. Nobody else has succeeded in getting a broadcast licence. In 2005, when a band of pro-democracy activists started a pirate station, Citizens’ Radio, that broadcast weekly political commentary, their offices were raided by police.
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September 18th, 2009
Thunderstorm seen from the footbridge over Mong Kok Road
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July 11th, 2009
July 3rd, 2009
http://www.vimeo.com/4451414
Time-lapse footage of big city traffic is a bit of a cliché, but this isn’t time-lapse: it’s stop-motion. Edwin Lee has managed to capture Hong Kong’s evening energy with this animation made from more than 10,000 still images of the city. It’s meant to serve as a music video for an instrumental piece by the local band A Roller Control, whose song “TV Dream” serves as an excellent companion to the images. The video is also a finalist in I Shot Hong Kong’s MV category. (I attended ISHK’s premiere the other night, incidentally, and the festival’s program includes some excellent short films — but also some that are entirely cringe-worthy.)
Another video by Lee, “The Way Home,” is much more conventional, but pretty enjoyable nonetheless. It reminds me why I always make a point of sitting in the top deck’s front seat whenever I ride the bus.
http://www.vimeo.com/3951788
June 9th, 2009
Part of Mongkok’s allure is the feeling you get that it teeters perpetually on the brink of chaos. There’s so much going on — and so much of it hidden away on the upper floors of dilapidated walkups, deep within labyrinthine commercial blocks or halfway down a narrow laneway — that any visitor to the neighbourhood is belittled and disoriented. Like a drug, the loss of control is unsettling yet strangely enticing. Nobody has a grip on what’s really happening in Mongkok; it lives by its own intangible rules.
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April 27th, 2009
Hong Kong is an entrepreneurial place. Even when a shop goes out of business, it isn’t out of the game: as soon as the shutter comes down, the broker signs go up. In most cities, a landlord might try to rent the space out himself, or hire to a single broker to do the job. Here, brokers compete for the space. Shuttered shops become symbolic battlefields on which brokers fight for a commission equivalent to a month’s rent — no small sum of money in a city where ground-floor shops go for thousands of dollars per square foot.
With retail on just about every street, many neighbourhoods have their fair share of vacant shops, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the next street over from my apartment, where this photo was taken, a restaurant found the sidewalk in front of an empty store the perfect place to set up a couple of tables and some stools.
March 15th, 2009
Looking east down Prince Edward Road
March 14th, 2009
Click on the image above to watch an audio slideshow
I didn’t even notice the smell until my friend Will McCallum pointed it out — I was too busy contemplating what it would be like to spend my nights in a cage set inside a one-room apartment with ten other men (not to mention the occasional cockroach). But the smell, when I finally paid attention, was pretty terrible. The apartment had two grimy bathrooms, one with a squat toilet and one with a sit toilet, and the smell of shit and stale sweat wafted through the whole place. We were in Tai Kok Tsui, a gritty neighbourhood just a few minutes away from one of Mongkok’s glossier shopping malls, covering a press conference by the Society for Community Organization, a non-government group that is working to eliminate substandard housing in Hong Kong.
Cage homes have been around for a long time. They first emerged after World War II when hundreds of thousands of refugees from mainland China arrived in Hong Kong. Today, there are still 53,200 people living in cage and cubicle homes. (Cubicle homes are apartments that are subdivided into tiny rooms separated only by flimsy plywood walls.) Some of these are licenced and regulated by the government, but housing activists say that thousands more people, including single-parent families, refugees and recent immigrants, live in illegal cage and cubicle homes where conditions are particularly dire. At a housing-rights protest we attended last October, we met women who lived with their children in vermin-infested cubicles less than 100 square feet in size.
Some people live in cages and cubicles because they are the waiting list for public housing; others choose to live there because they are often centrally-located. Some are refugees or undocumented immigrants who cannot afford a proper apartment and who are not eligible for government housing. I get the sense that inertia had something to do with it, too: when you live in a cage home, the toll on your health and mental well-being is such that it becomes hard to save up enough to leave. Most of the men in the apartment we visited did not work, and they spent most of their meagre welfare allowances on rent, which can be more than HK$1,000 per cage. The apartment we visited in Tai Kok Tsui had eleven cages. In that neighbourhood, a one-room apartment like that would rent for no more than $4,000 or $5,000 per month. You do the math — that’s a lot of profit for the landlord.
Along with another friend, Zoe Li, Will and I made a brief audio slideshow about cage homes. It was our first attempt at creating something like this, and the audio mixing is a bit rough, but I hope it gives you more of an idea about the underbelly of Hong Kong’s housing situation.
October 6th, 2006
One Night in Mongkok. Photo by Christopher DeWolf.
Wet. One second standing on the sidewalk, screaming at my cell, flick the clock forward, sopping wet. An air conditioner box exploded over my head. I remember it as a cutting, little slivers of time; first droplet, expected if unwanted, second, began inching towards the street, third, full, and I’m standing in abrupt silence, the phone running water and beginning to buzz. I watched water roll down the LCD for a naked minute before looking up. Rationalize, really, it’s like getting rained on out of nowhere, happens a lot in this city, doesn’t it? Sure the water’s dirty, but don’t kid yourself, so’s the rain. But, rationalizing the real damage was harder — but fuck, the cell phone!
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