A seahorse a day keeps the doctor away

In Sheung Wan

Star Street

  

Distinctive facade on the garbage collection station in one of Hong Kong’s chic-est neighbourhoods, on Star Street.

The Strange Case of Hong Kong Amoy Cinema

Currently on at the Hong Kong Film Archives, and entering its last few weeks, is this interesting programme. Titled “the strange case of Hong Kong Amoy Cinema” it explores a little-known genre of 1950s films made in Hong Kong and shot in the “Amoy” dialect, one of the Minnan languages of China’s Fujian province.

The reason the films were so little known is that few in Hong Kong speak the language and the movies were not screened here, yet they were also banned in the PRC so few Fujianese could see them either. A film industry without an audience; so how did they survive?

The answer: they were devoured by a scattered Southeast Asian diaspora numbering in its millions, before largely dying off in the 1960s. An odd little cul de sac of Asian cinema history.

Yayoi Kusama hits the spot

In the “art frenzy” surrounding Hong Kong’s international art fair in May (see below), one of the most exciting names is Yayoi Kusama . The Japanese dowager of polka dots, is famed for her four decades of insane psychedelic paintings and installations – of polka dots, or snake-like twisting patterns, or pumpkins – that have made her one of the hottest names on the circuit (although she lives in a Japanese mental institution).

She is the ‘safe’ face of edgy (and indeed rumoured to be next in line for the job of Louis Vuitton design collaborator, succeeding Takashi Murakami).

    

Oddly, she has two exhibits on in the city at the moment. One – in a sign of her commercial prowess – is opening the HK branch of Sotheby’s, while the other, titled “Infinity in the Universe of Yayoi Kusama” is on at the Opera Gallery. I wonder if either of them will approach her recent, blissfully simple installation in Brisbane, titled “The Obliteration Room”. Visitors were given brightly coloured stickers and let loose in a stark, all-white room – with the results recorded.

How I learned to love the Middle Levels

In the last few weeks I have discovered “the Mid Levels”. Which is odd since I have been here a year. The Mid Levels are located – unsurprisingly – halfway up the steep hill that forms that backbone of Hong Kong Island. The area is a bit vaguely defined – everyone has their own slightly different version – but the area above (but South of) Hollywood Road – Soho – is a good starting point.

Here, many of the island’s nicest restaurants, bars and boutiques are concentrated in a quaint and tony little bubble, on steeply risingly streets. So why hadn’t I explored it earlier?

The Mid Levels is Hong Kong’s gweilo central, desperately in denial of its place in Asia. In many streets here you see more white faces than Asian, and the Irish pubs, Mexican restaurants and inauthentic sushi bars are filled with young transplanted professionals from Lille, Dublin or Toronto. The connection between this hovering enclave and the rest of the city is minimal. Its the most relentlessly Westernized place on the continent.

With the righteousness of a new arrival I had dismissed the area as a self-absorbed playground for those too scared or unimaginative to engage with the city at large; but now, a year later, my hardline stance has predictably softened. Its not as if I have been doing such a great job at integrating – or particularly want to – either. And in a city that is starved of pleasant places to just hang out, I have to admit the area had its (overpriced) charms. At least it is …nice.

Parts of Soho really do feel to me like a sunnier London – you could be on a (less gay) Old Compton Street.

My favourite spot so far is the Soho Junction, a rickety openair bar with dressed down locals and Nepalese owners, looking across a pretty local intersection and the green shacks of street market traders. Here you can sink a pint and eavesdrop on conversations about Perth real estate or meet Spanish backpackers, while enjoying a real tropical evening breeze. Just next door, stone stairs descend past a wondrous little reminder of the area’s roots – a mini-shrine in a corrugated iron shack, lit with fluoro lights and wreathed in smoke from a dozen spiral incense sticks.

At the base of  this staircase I found a kitsch-beyond-words “African bar” with fake animal pelt banquettes and “giraffes blood” cocktails, and the “Joyce artists cafe” which I am yet to try.

But it seems like the area is more than worth a return visit.

Soho shrine

 

HK Art report

As Hong Kong gears up to its money-raking international Art Fair, a number of interesting little exhibitions have popped up around the city. I hope to do the rounds this weekend.

The “Daydreaming” exhibition at Artistree Gallery, Taikoo Shing can already be crossed off the list. I dropped by during the week. (I virtually have to walk past it to get to my local supermarket, after all). The space is currently showing a collobration with James Lavelle, the chronically pretentious 1990s head honcho of Mo’Wax records, a formerly white-hot London ‘abstract hip hop’ label. The trip hop vogue wore off some time ago and the exhibition, frankly, was not overly exciting. It featuring a darkened room, some portentous music and various mostly-mediocre artworks by Hong Kong and visiting artists.

+55: Brazilian Art Now ( sooo cliche – insert country name here – Art Now) is another current showing. Named after the country calling code for Brazil, it will see artists from the country exhibiting at Wanchai Convention Centre at the Fabrik Gallery.

Beauty in Ruin, on show at the Identity Gallery in Sheung Wan is a study of buildings in decay, featuring illustrations by Kounosuke Kawakami.

But most interesting of all to me is Huang Cheng’s ”Colossal Rat-Legitimacy” on show at the Wellington gallery on Hollywood Road. This promises to be an eerily realistic five-metre long silicone rat (not unlike Patricia Piccinini’s works in Australia) with traditional Chinese cupping on its back.

Bus beauty

Well, Y not?

Canto-pop flamer Wyman Wong has just re-released his recent Y100 album with a brand spanking new cover. After all, the other one was more than a month old.

Detox

I had a great weekend. On Friday night I went out on the town with my good friend – who I will call “K” –  running through the pouring rain, meeting random British people in a restaurant and bringing them with us to our favourite HK bar, which is actually called Le Jardin but was dubbed for the night “Ghetto Club”. Then we got chased down the street  - in torrential rain again – by a freak (…long story…) and danced at gay club Propaganda until four in the morning.

And we drank, drank, drank.

And then I left my phone in a taxi.

The next day I opened my eyes, and decided it was time to detox. Not from the alcohol which even now was pulsing queasily through my internal organs, but from the phone. Although of course I was put out at first, I wondered if it might not be a good opportunity. Its so unnatural, always being hooked in, sitting on the bus endlessly surfing the web, earphones always in, overstimulated and jittery. For the rest of the weekend, minus my phone,  I went about my little weekend errands unaccompanied by music or status updates and I felt quite refreshed.

Look what I found

 

Bangkok X HK : Cultural exchange

Don’t you hate it when you read about something fun – just after it has finished?

Little did I know that while Thailand was enjoying its Songkran New Year celebrations, Hong Kong was hosting its own mini-version. The Thai immigrant neighbourhood of Kowloon City held a local festival complete with the traditional water-splashing. I totally would have gone.

In Bangkok meanwhile the Rock Around Asia gallery (tacky name) is hosting an elegant-sounding event screening the films of Wong Kar Wai in a rooftop open-air cinema, with a gallery showing erotic and gay art and Southeast Asian crafts below.

In fact both cities have some interesting-sounding events lined up; Bangkok has just hosted a K-Pop blowout extravaganza concert and opened a Japanese-Peruvian fusion restaurant on the thirty third floor of a Sukhumvit skyscraper. Hong Kong meanwhile is welcoming French indie band Tahiti 80 to its “Hidden Agenda” indie club in a Kwun Tong industrial estate and hosting, more typically,a super-glitzy and commercial art/literature/schmoozing extravaganza bankrolled by swanky department store, Lane Crawford. Known as Liberatum it will see an impressive, if random-sounding, roster of artists appearing at free events including locals Khalil Fong (soul singer) and Wing Shya (photographer), MIA, author VS Naipaul and William Orbit.