March 17th, 2010
Street art in Hong Kong tends to be limited to specific areas and the scene is dominated by a handful of very prolific artists, like Start from Zero and Graphic Airlines, who work mainly with posters, stencil art and stickers. In a few corners of town, though, it’s possible to find clusters of exuberantly traditional graffiti. One of these can be found along a laneway next to Mong Kok East Station on the former KCR (now East Rail) line. There’s a couple of Graphic Airlines paste-ups but mostly it’s stuff I don’t recognize, which is refreshing.
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February 24th, 2010
Last October I moved to a new apartment — and with a new apartment comes to a new roof to explore. Unfortunately, my new building’s rooftop is far from spacious, with just two narrow platforms accessible through the fire stairs. Ladders lead up to two higher platforms, one atop the elevator shaft and another on top of what I assume is the water tank. The only things up there are satellite dishes, antennae and mobile phone receptors, which makes for a kind of depressing space. There isn’t even room to dry laundry.
There are, however, some pretty good views. To the east, there’s Langham Place and the highrise jungle of central Mongkok. To the east, there’s a view down Argyle Street towards Ma On Shan, one of Hong Kong’s tallest peaks, and to the west, a view over the Diocesan Boys’ School towards Kowloon Tong and the Lion Rock.
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February 13th, 2010
I’ve never seen anyone get so angry over flowers.
It’s tradition to buy flowers in advance of the Chinese New Year, a festival that celebrates renewal as one lunar year gives way to another. Last year, when I was living in the Mongkok Flower Market, I watched as traffic became more and more snarled as the days led towards the new year. By the time the last week year came around, I was being woken up on weekend mornings by endless honking and angry shouts. Leaving my building meant fighting for sidewalk space with housewives willing to slaughter and maim for the last peach blossom or peony.
When I returned to the Flower Market last week to take some photos, it didn’t surprise me that the first thing I saw was a shouting match. A crowd had formed at the corner of Sai Yee Street as several people stood screaming at a few uniformed men and women.
After a few minutes, the screamers gave up and walked off in a huff. I followed them to a flower stall in a nearby laneway and asked what they were so angry about. I was answered by Kelly Cheung, a petite young woman with plastic-framed glasses and vaguely elfin features whose family has run the stall for more than 30 years.
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February 8th, 2010
Before I moved from the Flower Market to Homantin last year, I went up to my building’s rooftop for a few last photos of the view, which gave out onto the towers of Mongkok on one side and the mountains north of Kowloon on the other.
January 7th, 2010
It’s hard to describe the sound of Sai Yeung Choi Street on a typical evening. It’s the echo of horns and sirens through the Mongkok canyons, the cacophony of video billboards and shop stereos. It’s the sound of sixteen thousand shoppers flocking each hour to the most crassly commercial of Hong Kong streets.
But there’s more to it than just shopping. Sai Yeung Choi Street is also the “West Dog-Dragon Cultural District,” a feisty theatre group’s response to government-led cultural initiatives like West Kowloon. (In Cantonese, dog and nine are homonyms, so Dog-Dragon and Kowloon are pronounced the same way.) Since 2003, FM Theatre Power (FTMP) has used the street as the base for its off-kilter performances, turning a shrine to consumerism into a haven for art.
“We want to engage Hong Kong people in the street, to break the barrier between them and performers,” says Banky Yeung, FMTP’s enigmatic creative director. “They’re not used to seeing street performances – they think it’s for beggars. They think that streets are only for walking or shopping. That attitude goes up into the government. We want to challenge these negative perceptions.”
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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
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
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.
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
