Kwun Tong: cool?

With its low rents and spacious industrial lofts, Kwun Tong has all the prerequisites for developing into a thriving ‘artsy’ neighbourhood – HK’s Williamsburg or Shoreditch. In fact, few people in Hong Kong have realised, but it is already  – very stealthily – happening. There are few outwards signs of this. You could easily wander through the area without picking up on anything especially “hip” bubbling up under the surface. But it is. It is said that 80% of the city’s indie rock bands are based here in cheap rehearsal spaces, and the city’s rocking-est basement live music venue ‘Hidden Agenda” is also in the area as a result.

Add in a wellknown tattoo parlour, an skate park in an old warehouse, a long running pirate radio station and some street grafitti (including a protected piece by the best known HK street artist, the King of Kowloon) and you can see where this is going.

It is not as though any of this is particularly obvious to the casual visitor though. You really have to know where to go to find it, but this is in fact a centre for Hong Kong’s embryonic counter-culture.

I had heard about a furniture-recycling warehouse painted to look like a giant cave (called ‘Cave’) and a rooftop farm project, but when I stumbled around the neighbourhood on the eve of the Chinese New Year, both of these were shut for business.

This was open though, and amazing. The Osage Art Gallery (new to the area) was showing a retrospective of Andy Warhol films, as a more “underground” accompaniment to his concurrent big show at the main Hong Kong art museum. I found the gallery on the fifth floor of a very industrial building – you have to enter through the forklift bay – and took an elevator up to step into a darkened room with scattered, multicoloured beanbags, floating silver balloons and the huge black-and-white images of Candy Darling and the other Factory proteges flickering on the gallery’s concrete walls.

It was a thrilling little moment, an indication of what Kwun Tong has the potential to be. Who knew Hong Kong had anything like this?

But the big question now is: will this scene be killed off before it has even come to maturity? With the redevelopment plans for the district powering forward, are the days of cheap rents for galleries and rehearsal rooms over? Will HK’s indie headquarters be shut down before it has even begun?

NSFW – Local band, The Yours.