How to admire a Floating City — Interviewing Hong Kong architect and photographer Kevin Mak
(Originally written by Emily Wong in Chinese in 2016, published in Undergrad, abridged and translated by the author)
It was near the end of a shooting day for The Inspired Island I, a series of biographical documentaries on acclaimed littérateurs from Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. Park Jae Woo, a renown Korean professor specializing in Chinese literature, hurriedly stood up to leave for a meeting. Then he halted as if just being snapped back into reality, turned around, looked wistfully into the director’s eyes, and lamented that he used to come to Hong Kong just to drink with Yasi. Now that the writer’s gone, there is nothing to stay around for. It was the only Hong Kong he had ever loved: one with Yasi slightly tilting his snifter in a club chair, his bespectacled face submerging and surfacing in a room of darkness like that of a chiaroscuro painting. He exerts his weight on the city and compresses it into a fuzzy backdrop.
Or has Hong Kong always been a fuzzy backdrop? In various action video games, in cyberpunk, dystopian, tech-noir movies. You would expect to see tong laus sandwiched between tong laus; whey-faced, quick-tempered restaurant staff spitting and smoking in dark alleys. Not only do foreigners expect it — the locals define themselves with it. But how should one travel beyond the exotic and begin to unravel the city’s visual culture?
When I first came across Kevin Mak, an active Instagram user and photographer with over eighty-five thousand followers who set out to tell “urban stories” from the point of view of an architect, the Hong-Kong-street-photography bandwagon had just taken off. Scattered among his profile are rattling trams, butchers chopping up under dangling red lamps, workers loading fresh seafood onto bicycles, crammed old public housing in Ngau Tau Kok unfurling into the distance, bleak-toned roads stained by alarmingly red taxis. One cannot ask for anything more quintessentially Hong-Kong. I immediately invited Kevin to a meetup to talk about his photography and about Hong Kong’s urban landscape, drafted up pages of questions, and became aware of how difficult a question I was proposing — how should we see a city? Would he be able to explain as impressively as he was able to record? Or is there anything, really, to decipher in the first place? What if certain things are only meant to be looked at?
An order of disorder: signs as a form of mutual understanding
We met in a warm-wood-toned fishbowl meeting room at the back of the OMA office’s studio. Kevin looked lean in his clean French crop haircut and simple black sweatshirt. He greeted me amiably and without further ado, took out a thick catalogue of annotated snapshots on the streets that he put together all by himself, having no idea about the kind of doubts that he just repelled from my mind.
We decided to start with the most iterative visuals in his photography — signs, both traditional and neon. “Back in the 1930–40s, arcade was a rare sight. Stores were lined up along streets and were extremely close to one another,” he said. “In Sham Shui Po, for example, you can see signs being chaotically dispersed. But if you read closely, you will see an almost inconceivable pattern. They are somehow accommodating one another,” he started tracing the various directions that the signs are pointing to with his little finger. “They wouldn’t spring out in places that entirely block the ones behind and would try to avoid overlapping with the ones in front. For instance, they would come in a vertical shape to allow the horizontal ones near it to be seen.”
It was, and still is, a gesture of mutual respect between neighbouring businesses. Such tacit consensus is much more rarely seen in the West or places with vast lands and openings since the signs would spread out more sporadically, illustrated by common sights of neon motel signs standing alone, overseeing the night in a deserted highway. In other regions, signs are also perceived as more of a subcultural symbol alongside its primary function for business, whereas in Hong Kong, signs found its roots in necessity.
The iconic red-and-white signs became prevalent in the 1950s, most of which were simple ones that only meant to indicate the kind of products they were selling: if a store sold jeans, then the sign would only read “jeans”. “It was an age of practicality,” explained Kevin, “and they were done in a very traditional way: by hiring calligraphists. The calligraphists would set up booths and write those signs on the streets right away. By convention, one calligraphist would be responsible for all of the signs in a designated area. Entering the 1970s, the small-sized businesses began to expand and needed gimmicks. They thus started to commission signs in different shapes and sizes. It’s a whole new level of competition.”
Kevin flipped to the next page and invited me to compare two juxtaposed pictures. Both of them are photos of a street, the left one filled with criss-crossing signs, and the right one so empty one could feel wind howling through.
“They are both Tai Nan Street,” he said mournfully. The government’s crackdown on illegal signs led to the removal of thousands of signboards over the years for safety and scenic concerns, with no intention in restoring them for the sake of conservation any time soon. As what Jane Jacobs had duly noted in her name-making work of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “there is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
But it always takes two to tango — people did not seem to be too concerned with the disappearance of these signs either. Kevin once bumped into a shopkeeper who was about to throw away an enormous pawn shop sign that read the iconic “押”. He, together with another person who happened to be on the scene, immediately stepped up and requested to keep it. The shopkeeper, despite being in total bewilderment, gave it to them. “Me and the other guy each took one side of it home,” he smiled bitterly. Since then, Kevin would wander around the city and scavenge unwanted or abandoned traditional and neon signs.
Now we are just love-disabled
Love Disabled is one of the signature songs from local indie band My Little Airport that describes a phenomenon of, in the song’s own words, “l’impossibilité d’aimer dans notre temps” (the impossibility of love in our time). This idea mirrored what Kevin observed, that people in this city has lost the inborn ability to love, or more specifically, to fall in love with culture, a stranger that has lived with us since the beginning of time. He talked about his experience in Paris and how it compared to life in Hong Kong. “All these cafés (in Paris) were allowed to extend into the street. They were mostly half indoor and half outdoor. Some glass houses even take up half of the pavement. You won’t see this in Hong Kong. Paris is of course much more sparsely populated, but it’s not like they have much broader roads; some of them are just as narrow because of outdated urban planning. It’s a matter of choice; it’s culture. If the same thing happens in Hong Kong, people are going to start complaining about how this is blocking their ways.”
It was observed that the lack of interest in cultural delights or preservation is particularly common among people from older generations. As young people would now flock to public housing estates to take pastel-coloured and vintage-style photos, Kevin’s grandparents, for instance, had no way of understanding how this became a trend. “But it’s very understandable,” said Kevin as he shrugged. “My grandparents spent their entire lifetime just to escape that ‘cage’ (the public housing estate).”
As much as they remain an unappealing place for some, the hive-like stories of flats have become an eye candy for many. Photography that highlights such density was first created by Michael Wolf, a Hong Kong-based German artist and photographer. “It’s intense and orderly, a very interesting visual pattern. From this angle,” Kevin gestured, “it shows how much people literally live in shoeboxes. But still, you can see people leading different lives out of standardized flats. Some of them grew a jungle out of their places, some used fabrics of strips to cover up the see-through space, some used the little balcony as an indoor extension, some dried salted fish on it.” After all, it is and has always been every Hong Konger’s lifelong undertaking to create uniqueness out of limited space.
“Would you like to take a look around?” Kevin kindly offered as we were about to wrap up the interview. He led me through an open plan office and talked enthusiastically about the projects his team was working on. We came to a model of a modern-style, supposedly glass-paned complex with a gigantic sphere propped up by two metallic pillars bashing into it on the side. “It’s the future Taipei Performing Arts Center,” he announced. “There are going to be multiple theatres inside, including the sphere. You see how we lift the ball up? The idea is to leave out more space for the public to conduct their activities underneath.”
Meanwhile, public space seems to be less of an architectural concern in Hong Kong. In recent days, the court has just issued a temporary injunction order that prohibited any sort of busking activities in the open area in front of Time Square, decided on the grounds that Time Square, owner of the estate, had only allowed “pedestrian passage and passive recreation”. They accused the much celebrated busking activities of being a nuisance, and supported such claim by statistical “evidence” showing that the activities in regard has produced noise of over 90 decibels, in complete disregard for the public’s welcoming attitude towards the events. Creating space appears to be only pertinent when it is done for the sake of accelerating urban development, as shown in Tsuen Wan’s case where gargantuan flyovers have come to cover a large area in the district, connecting malls to malls, dissecting social space in half, redirecting crowds towards designated shops and businesses by the reconstruction of space. It is as if our patterns of behavior and lifestyle are constantly programmed in a way not known to ourselves, as a whole new order creeped inch by inch into place.
As the clock struck nine, I said my goodbyes to Kevin and walked down the stairs that rolled all the way down Zetland Street. Looking out on it from a height, it resembled an enormous crack; the two high-rise buildings that bordered it opened up narrow creeks of skies just as dark. One could have easily mistaken the sight as something taken on Ho Fan’s Rolleiflex 3.5F. A few loners standing on the sides retreated into the shadows like parasites wiring walls, red dots blinking between fingers were the only traces of life. People have eased into suffocation. Into a city that neither rises or sinks, neither at its best nor its worst.
