Negotiating with (dis-) appearance, every which way

YELLOW BAMBOO GROVE

On a whirlwind visit to my home city of Hong Kong, I find my-self zipping between rumbling cars and clicking traffic lights. I’m visiting the air-conditioned galleries sequestered in the south side’s nondescript industrial zone, just a mountain range away from Hong Kong’s effulgent and buzzy business and shopping district. As manufacturing business has dwindled, I’ve witnessed many grimy utilitarian buildings, lining the main roads full of car exhaust, becoming vacant, before being transformed into elegant art spaces. One of these was Spring Workshop, a residency and multi-disciplinary non-profit I directed between 2015 and 2017. The district, Wong Chuk Hang – which literally translates into ‘Yellow Bamboo Grove’ in English – was lush with vegetation until medium and light factories cropped up post-WWII along the shores of Aberdeen. The eclectic coexistence of exuberant nature trails, industry and coastline is idiosyncratic of the city’s discrepant layers of textures and modes, and forms the evocative backdrop of Wu Tsang’s commission Duilian (2016) with Spring Workshop, inspired by the feminist revolutionary and poet Qiu Jin and calligrapher Wu Zhiying (played by Tosh Basco and Wu Tsang, respectively) in 19^th century China. By reading between the lines of their poetry, the artist fittingly recasts their relationship, queerness and revolutionary fervour in post-colonial Hong Kong, a space whose anxious identity and history is subject to continuous overwriting.

MAROONED KINGDOM

One vivid night scene in Duilian takes place in nearby Aberdeen Typhoon Shelter. Qiu and Wu are scintillatingly lit by the bright lights and reflections of the once-iconic Jumbo Kingdom, an exuberant dining barge decorated in a lavish Chinese imperial fashion that was formerly the jewel of the harbour. Just weeks before the shoot, Wu, Tosh and I found ourselves aboard the vessel for a ritzy fundraiser, which started with an atmospheric ferry journey to the restaurant. Such floating restaurants were originally built and operated by fishing folk to host banquets and celebrations for their own community, until entrepreneurial restauranteurs appropriated the format. A major tourist attraction and setting for Hollywood films such as the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and Cantonese culinary comedy The God of Cookery (1996), the establishment closed in 2020 after forty-four years of operation.
Despite its illustrious status in the prime of Hong Kong’s economic prosperity in the 1980s and 90s, the troubled 2,300-diner vessel was rendered redundant and unprofitable, and left to a miserable fate lacking any economic or heritage value. In 2022, due to multiple expired licenses, the embattled watercraft was towed out of Hong Kong waters to Cambodia, where it would wait for a new owner, though there were doubts to its seaworthiness, as parts of the kitchen boat leaned over during its fateful journey. Ultimately, the entire vessel capsized in over 1,000-metre-deep waters in the South China Seas, with rumours of foul play yet to be confirmed in an impending investigation.

In a radiant scene from Duilian (2016), Wu Tsang’s fictitious exploration of Qiu Jin’s rumoured love affair with Wu Zhiying, the two women are illuminated by the lights of Jumbo Kingdom

Before it capsized, Jumbo Kingdom was a Hong Kong dining barge decorated in ornate Chinese imperial fashion, one of many restaurant vessels of its kind. These boats are somewhat emblematic of many elements of Hong Kong, combining bright lights, a buzzing atmosphere and the humidity of the water

TIME-WORN FRAGRANCES

It is eerie how this 1970s Chinese imperial barge, which so easily became a trope of Hong Kong’s image, was just as easily erased. The collective memory of the city’s inhabitants soon relegated the boat to bygone history. When directly translated into English, Hong Kong means ‘fragrant harbour,’ owing to the incense that was warehoused for export at the Aberdeen Harbour, the initial point of contact between British sailors and local fishermen.
Fast forward to now: I am standing at Empty Gallery, a stone’s throw from what is left of the original fishing industry on the island – boats moored at a hushed typhoon shelter and a saline-tinged seafood wholesale market of multicoloured and exotic catch of the day – contemplating how little of that history remains. Located in a sleepy residential neighbourhood at the far edge of the gallery district in Aberdeen, the space is a black cube known for its pitch-dark abyss in an inconspicuous high-rise industrial block in Tin Wan. Perhaps not coincidentally, what is on view is sculptor Jes Fan’s latest project that involves pearl cultivating, an obsolescent, 1,000-year-long, pre-colonial industry now being revived.

PEARL OF WHOSE ORIENT?

Conceptually connected to the city’s colonial nickname, ‘Pearl of the Orient,’ Fan’s suite of sculptures takes a native species of local oyster and its pearl formation as its starting point. Fan zooms in on the oyster’s natural defence mechanism – neutralising and integrating foreign matter into the host’s own soft, fragile body through its natural secretion of nacre – thus fusing violence and beauty into a luxury consumer product. Palimpsest (2023) docu-ments in video the lubricious sculptural process of how four Chinese characters that make up the city’s moniker are individually inserted into four separate oysters.
Later in the week, I return to the gallery where a rambunctious rave is in full swing to celebrate Art Basel Hong Kong. In need of a moment, I find an opening far from the smokers, and stop by the window-lined rim of the 18^th-storey unit. It overlooks the typhoon shelter, the taciturn roads and the unused flyovers dotted with streetlights glowing in the dead of night. Just further past the shelter lie industrial buildings that house, among other businesses, an ice-making factory and the offices of pro-Chinese state mouthpiece Wen Wei Pao. Thinking about Fan’s work, the duality of enchantment and control at play in coercing the molluscs to accept and ingest these alien ideograms, which become branded excrescence on their satiny opaline interior walls, is analogous to how Hong Kong has been whittled into shape by those who governed it, ever since its transformation from fishing village to full-fledged financial centre.

DOUBLE TAKE

Writing about the relationship between Hong Kong cinema and the representation of the city, renowned cultural theorist Ackbar Abbas coined the uncanny term déjà disparu – the antithesis of déjà vu – to describe the impossibility of keeping pace with an elusive subject like Hong Kong. What is new and unique about the place is equally always on the verge of disappearance, and what is then left is a handful of clichés. Depictions of Hong Kong on screen can be disorienting, but they also make a lasting impression; the power of these images creates a frame for reading a city that is too fast to be captured in cinematic time.
My encounter with Wong Kar Wai’s classic Chungking Express (1994) is not only belated but disconcerting. Two friends from the US are adamant about visiting Chungking Mansions, the key location of the eponymous film, during their brief stopover, which coincides with my visit. Not having access to the film when it was released in cinemas, I have no idea what to expect, but still trail behind them as they manoeuvre through the deluge of raucous crowds and shops, lining up for one of the lifts in the labyrinthine complex’s lobby.
The building, known as the unofficial African quarter of Hong Kong, is a large gathering and trading point for South Asians and Africans, and consists of a tightly knit jumble of guesthouses, residential units, food stalls and foreign exchange offices. With backpacks in tow, my companions and I squeeze out of the stuffed lift with a sweaty mob of people and walk into one of the pensions listed amongst the assorted bus-inesses on the floor directory. Acting like they need a place to stay for the night, they inquire at reception about rates and ask to view the rooms. In collective disbelief, we soak up the spartan interior, soon deciding we need to end the backpacker charade and leave. Perhaps it’s the fact that a local is in tow or our abrupt exit that sounds the alarm bells, and we narrowly escape the owner’s wrath just as he calls for his tenants to chase us out.

Unlike its depiction in Chungking Express, this 60-year-old building is actually home to motels, guest houses and shops, and to people from all over the world

Through intriguing and exploratory musing on cinema, architecture and literature, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997) sees renowned theorist Ackbar Abbas probe Hong Kong as a place of transit

SIDELONG GLANCES

Watching Chungking Express, finally, meant grappling with the uncanny estrangement between the cinematic depiction and actual experience of a place. I had to parse the affective emotions evoked through a cinematic construct versus, say, the adrenalin rush of our Chungking Mansion adventure. Another auteur known for his steadfastly sensitive and engrossing portrayals of Hong Kong is Fruit Chan. His two films Little Cheung (1999) and Durian Durian (2000) are set in Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei, the mise en scène of many gritty gangster films Hong Kong cinema is known for. In Chan’s socially critical films, however, these supposedly dangerous neighbourhoods are injected with humanity. In Durian Durian, Yan, working as a prostitute illegally on her three-month visa, is seen servicing multiple clients daily in her tiny subdivided flat, and hastily moving through clandestine shortcuts for moments of reprieve at the hair salon or Chinese diner. In a comic turn of events, her pimp is knocked unconscious in a backstreet by an assailant with an edible bludgeon: a durian.

In Fruit Chan’s film Durian Durian (2000), Yan, a young woman from Mainland China, lives in a tiny shared flat in the busy district of Mong Kok. Working as a prostitute on her three-month visa, Yan finds herself stuck in a cycle of work, takeaway food and short naps, all within the walls of her small room

A GOOD DENIZEN

The cinematic experience Chan offers through his alienated characters in their natural hab-itats, a literal backstage of the city, hidden from visibility and law enforcement, busy with washing dishes or illicit activities, adds an extra layer of realism to otherwise mundane cosmopolitan stories of survival embedded within the city’s fabric. One Halloween night in the early hours, in the very same neighbourhood, I sit dejected in front of the doorway of a brothel at my wits end. After trying to hail a cab for an hour, a surly-looking pimp comes by and, without saying much, walks into the road to stop one in no time before gruffly bidding me good night.
The 2000 film named after the outlandish tropical fruit – known for its acquired appeal due to its astringent smell, hard prickly exterior and sweet creamy interior – very well encapsulates the flavour and mood of the neighbourhood and its transitory inhabitants. Incidentally, Yau Ma Tei is also home to the fruit wholesale trade; saccharine delicacies are flown in from all around the world, catering to the city’s population of gastronomes. Through Chan and Wong’s lenses, Hong Kong functions not only as a backdrop but also as an enchanting and resilient protagonist estranged from time and place, and full of contradictions.

EBB AND GLOW

Neon researchers Brian Sze-Hang Kwok and Anneke Coppoolse write how technicolour tubes give the city a skin or an atmospheric layer. Distinct memories of my twenties, and of Wan Chai streets, are damp with sweat, spirits and drizzle. On asphalt roads an inky membrane captures the lingering glow of English fluorescent signs promoting seedy nightclubs named after faraway cities and planets: Neptune, San Francisco, Makati. Animating the thick murky air, these signs are vastly different from the logos of the predominantly Chinese characters that enliven Kowloon across the water.
During the day, Wan Chai’s streets, its wet markets and the nearby Southorn sports ground hum with office workers, residents and students. But at night the strip lights up, transforming. Rowdy bars blasting top-forty hits or Filipino live bands performing evergreen classics set the scene for a roaring night out for after-work revellers, tourists and, before tense Sino-American relations, occasional foreign service per-sonnel. But the once-bustling red-light district so imaginatively portrayed in its prime in The World of Suzie Wong (1960) lost its lustre as the elaborate billboards of topless bars, tattoo parlours – like the famed Ricky’s tattoos – and spectacular ballrooms-turned-nightclubs dimmed. This was a result of a generation of business-men moving to the mainland, along with Hong Kong’s manufacturing businesses, and the dwindling numbers of visiting military sailors since Hong Kong’s handover in 1997.

DARK PENINSULA

Whether you have been to Hong Kong or not, chances are you’ll know the glitzy imagery of neon-hued streets, and the nocturnal skyline illuminated by an array of effulgent logos atop skyscrapers on both sides of the Victoria Harbour. Relentlessly depicted in films and tourism advertising, these seductive visual markers of desire, consumerism and urbanity emerged during the heyday of Hong Kong’s manufacturing and financial boom post-WWII; be-tween the 1960s and the 80s, the city saw the introduction of more than 1,000,000 electric neon signs. The lights portrayed this burgeoning Asian city as a playground of optimism and adventure.
Growing up in Kowloon – or ‘the dark side,’ as many sophisticated island-dwelling residents and expatriates would call it, thanks to its unglamorous, rough-and-ready flair – I took many thrilling trips as a child with my parents, and later alone as a teenager, along Nathan Road, riding the upper deck of the bus at night. With each journey, dazzling rays and incandescent letters flashed past like light trails unfurling overhead along the oldest thoroughfare on the peninsula from the harbour inland. Zipping past me and barely leaving a clear impression in my mind was a cornucopia of advertisements: for nightclubs and restaurants in Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei, shops and brand names skirting the southern strip of Nathan Road, the shopping district once called the ‘Golden Mile.’
Even though my encounters with the city’s then-fugacious lightscape were fleeting, they found their way into our family photo album as records of my childhood. In these annual photos, I’m often surrounded by façades whose radiant embellishments denote the time of year; perhaps Christmas or Lunar New Year. In festive spirit, the city’s populace embraces local tradition – despite the mild winter weather – by wandering the promenade that is fully decked with seasonal light displays adorning buildings like twinkling greeting cards on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. Erected by land developers and corporations, these trimmings impart on the metropolis a coat of splendour enkindled by capital, dousing these festivities in a commercial sheen. They add to the perpetual burnish that limns the city’s night sky, earning it the label of ‘the city that never sleeps,’ or, more realistically, ‘the place with the worst light pollution.’

YELLOW

The widespread acceptance of off-colour topics in ordinary life can be seen in the presence of sex-related business classifieds in newspapers, and a type of erotica in literary form, also known as ‘yellow books,’ both in circulation the early 20^th century. In present-day Hong Kong, codes of the adult industry are interspersed as part of the city’s colourful visual language. These codes include striking advertisements on yellow light boxes, hand-written placards and pink-coloured neon nestled in entrances of old walk-up buildings, like the one where the Yau Ma Tei pimp found me. There is an open subversiveness to the extremely transactional and unmitigated presence of the erotic within the humid ex-colony, and it extends tangibly into the social–political realm. Take as example the pornographic magazine Lung Fu Pao – achieving a monthly circulation of 250,000 copies at its height. In 1989, the magazine included reportage of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and aligned itself with the student-led pro-democracy movement by donating all its proceeds to the cause.
Three decades later, during the 2019 city-wide anti-extradition protests, which divided society and its businesses into two coloured camps – blue, representing the pro-establishment, and yellow, representing pro-democracy – this prevailing, defiant sentiment moved from print to the virtual sphere. Multiple local porn-streaming sites went on strike, urging their users to take to the streets to learn about and protest the new legislation, the reason behind their shut-down. A different inventory of yellow urban mark-making in streets and in restaurants, such as stencilled slogans, political stickers and graffiti, has emerged and been incorporated as part of the movement, embracing a crude and colourful language as part of its aspirational messaging. During the months of the active movement, I often found myself in crowded shops or eateries plastered with these tokens of solidarity, where citizens became patrons of businesses that aligned with their politics. However, since the sudden arrival of the pandemic that dampened the movement, many of these insignias have been painted over in mismatched grey. With new laws forbidding protests or anti-government speech, these grey blobs gesture towards traumatic wounds and unfulfilled political desire for democracy for many across the city.

GRUB STREET

Years ago, a friend and flaneur living in Hong Kong since the 1990s told me that the best way to find authentic Thai food in Wan Chai is to follow where the ‘girls’ eat. The diverse demographics of ladies is mirrored in the types of hole-in-the-wall eateries that are open beyond regular business hours. One of my favourite haunts was always the cheap and cheerful Thai Hut, which said friend, J., brought me to. They do not skimp on herbs or spices and deliver a mean green curry. Not fitting with the typical clientele of white tourists and Thai girls, the talkative ladies behind the counter always shot me a knowing look of approval whenever I came by for a bite, or when I made large take-away orders for gallery openings at work.
Serving a different working population – that of domestic helpers – is Cinta-J, a Filipino bar and restaurant. Where there are Filipinos, there is guaranteed to be singing, and Cinta-J’s resident band are like human jukeboxes; you can request any song to be performed on stage. On occasion, I have bumped my song choice – usually a Lady Gaga or Beyoncé hit – up the queue by feigning a dedication for a friend’s birthday, hoping for a mood change from the power ballads they love playing. Even when the streets were eerily deserted due to the onset of COVID-19, the full band was still there, singing on stage, while my friend C. and I sat at the only occupied table. We watched a new acquaintance from that night –
a Japanese chef passing through the city for less than twenty-four hours – dance to their version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat It.’

LOST IN MIS-TRANSLATION

The coupling of early capitalism and the sex industry can be traced in the surrounding area of Sheung Wan, where Chinese street names are markers of sex-adjacent eco-nomies in the proximity of, and catering to clients of, brothels in the area. Take, for instance, the close by Jervois Street. Named in English after a British general, its Chinese name links it to two cities renowned for their delicate silk production – Suzhou and Hangzhou – drawing reference to the proliferation of the cluster of silk and fabric merchants that appeared on this strip. Another example is Lyndhurst Terrace a little further down, which, like Jervois Street’s exquisite textile shops, alludes to the thick file of flower stalls that once served customers who wanted to woo nearby courtesans.
Only the dried-seafood vendors that established their base in and around Wing Lok Street and Bonham Strand remain. They continue to maintain a link to the area’s historical affiliation with the fishing and colonial entrepot trade. The rows of dried fish and prized seafoods, namely abalone, fish maw and the now-frowned-upon shark fin, alongside other exotic medicinal herbs and aphrodisiacs – all revered for their health benefits and auspicious meanings – give off a lingering pungent smell that characterises the area. The briny scent is an olfactory reminder of a phantom coastline since moved offshore, kept alive through the area’s thriving mercantile business.

Borrowing its name from the Hong Kong adult magazine, restaurant Lung Fu Pao in Central Hong Kong’s vibrant Soho district has its bathroom walls covered with pages from pornographic magazines. The restaurant is peppered with sexual innuendos, from bananas hanging by the entrance to its hentai-themed menu cards

SALTY WET

One crucial Cantonese cultural trait wedged firmly in the realm of untranslatability is how the erotic and obscene have commingled with daily life since the turn of the 19^th century. Reaching beyond the ways in which the coastal cityscape has been shaped by numerous migratory movements of the erotic industry throughout the past centuries, ham sup – meaning ‘salty wet’ when translated literally into English, and ‘perversity’ when translated approximately – is an expression deeply ingrained in all forms of life and cultural expression in Hong Kong. Allegedly originating from the term ‘ham shops,’ a euphemism for brothels post-Opium War in Guangzhou in the mid-19^th century, it was eventually transliterated and entered the Cantonese lexicon to describe a usually male, lascivious behaviour or mentality.

THRESHOLDS OF ARTICULATIONS

The innovative spirit of Hong Kong lives and evolves through time, as does its colloquial language. True to its no-holds-barred attitude to slang and vernacular culture, the Chinese character of the door, is a key semantic element in the expanding Cantonese lexicon of sayings – and profanities – that appear first in everyday speech before they are recorded formally. In swear words like ‘fuck’, ‘male genitalia’ or ‘vagina’, which are collectively known as ‘the outstanding five of a kind,’ the door symbol is combined with a phonetic element that indicates its pronunciation, forming compound characters that are also utilised outside their original meanings, creatively integrated with gusto in common speech. In informal spaces, such as local diners like the Australian Dairy Company, known for its staff’s second-to-none craft of cussing at customers, or parks where neighbourhood folks congregate, or in front of betting stations on racing days, you are bound to be bombarded by a lively repertoire of guttural swear-word-packed speech, adding to the existing overlay of street hubbub that characterises the ambient sounds of Hong Kong.

ESCAPE HATCHES

The door character resembles the portals into free subcultural spaces that formerly nestled in the basements of inconspicuous side streets. The now-historical establishments of my time were once precarious nooks of pleasure that drew in underground and non-conventional communities: the now-closed Chemical Suzy, an alternative music hideaway across the harbour in Tsim Sha Tsui; Propaganda, an LGBTI+ bastion in Central that closed after a quarter of a decade in 2016; XXX gallery, an underground music venue that ran for seven years before being shuttered by local politicians and rising rents in three locations; Club 71, the favourite back-alley bar of a generation of Hong Kong political activists, artists and media figures that closed after seventeen years amidst stringent COVID-19 restrictions in the city… These spaces and their communities were not only embraced but thrived under the regime of invisibility.
The threat of disappearance to both spaces of play in Hong Kong and Cantonese as the lingua franca, in the face of the ascent of Mandarin and Chinese values increasingly being inscribed into the cityscape, is symptomatic of Hong Kong’s fraught limbo between its present relation to mainland China and its colonial past. And yet, Hong Kong’s long history as a place of escape for pirates, revolutionaries and those affected by floods, famine and typhoons might impart some hope. Thanks to the city’s inherent inventiveness and resilience, new emancipatory forms and expressions – like freshly constructed Cantonese characters in the ever-expanding erotic lexicon – or experimental sanctuaries are bound to mat-erialise. And in true Hong Kong fashion, they will emerge in ever more clandestine ways.

In this 9 October 2020 photo, owner Grace Ma poses for a photo at her bar Club 71 in Central, a business district of Hong Kong. The bar, known as a gathering place for pro-democracy activists and intellectuals, has closed. Ma blamed government-mandated bar closures and coronavirus restrictions for its financial strain. Taipei Times Photo: AP

21 Hong Kong: Negotiating with (dis-) appearance, every which way

by Christina Li