Why do we want things?

I have been on a mission to track down tempered steel picture nails in Wanchai, the area that has many little hardware stores, framers, stationers and art supplies stores. Up and down Queens Road East, Johnston Road and all the streets that link them....nowhere to be found. They all just shrug and offer masonry screws and plugs or picture hooks with multiple small pins that you hit into the wall. I need steel picture nails because I do not have another thing, an electrical drill, to fix the masonry screws into the wall. This means I have to either contact Amanwithadrill.com or buy this thing. The bare walls have become intolerable, as without things on them, it just does not feel like home. And that big thing, that throbbing picture of the city outside, the tall, gigantic buildings in Central, needs to be tempered by some other things.

Thinking about things and why things are important (anthropologists have filled libraries on this topic) made me think about what a girl during the recent riots in London said: 'we have showed the rich people that we can take their things and they can do nothing about it'. Gavin Esler, the anchor on BBC's Dateline in a recent TV debate, summarized a panel discussion on the rioting as 'the looters wanting things that they see the rich have'. These are perhaps banal statements about what the rioting was all about, but the fact of the matter is that the looters gave expression to their resentment, disenfranchisement and frustrations by damaging and looting things, thereby upsetting the status quo.

The Hong Kong Museum of History is on the left.

Delivery man from the stationary shop.

I will be relieving my frustration with and fear of the white wall spaces by putting up things like maps, new and antiquarian images of Hong Kong - all showing various things - using screws and wall plugs, and hopefully not be damaging the landlord's property, whilst I ponder the serious topic of the relationships between violence and things.

The photographs include a picture of the Hong Kong Museum precinct that houses a collection of things that explain the peopling of and various customs practiced in Hong Kong, and the shop to the right sells various paper ware, including envelopes for money gifts, and a variety of ritual joss papers and paper objects that are burned during ancestral worship. Incidentally, there was an outcry last week in the papers because the Palace Museum curators in Beijing were neglectful with the peoples' things and broke some ceramic plates in their care.