African Bizarre: up close and intimate in Soho

A new friend's 40th saw us at the Makumba Lounge and Bar for an Africa Bizarre celebration. A very chic, but sour, lead singer sat in the corner when we arrived and the mood never lifted throughout the entire evening. She was, thankfully, in good voice and sang Happy Birthday without smiling once. Quite an achievement.

Hong Kong must have been stripped bare of every fake zebra and tiger skin outfit this weekend, and there were some extraordinary suits, dresses with daring cut outs, stockings and peacock feathers. Also a banana on tiger print legs. But first prize went to two guys in full print suits - the one in zebra and the other in tiger wearing trendy dark, squared-framed Jay Jopling-type glasses. The tasty African tapas, a hybrid misnomer if ever there was one, included mince balls, chicken wings, African spring rolls (what's that?), deep fried sweet potatoes and plantains.

When we started reflecting upon celebrating with the 40 year old young things, we thought it time to move on from Peel Street and walk around Soho. In Hong Kong, Soho stands for South of Hollywood Road, and usually means either Staunton and Elgin Road. As it turned out, we didn't get much further than the Feather Boa in Staunton Road, an unmarked, so-called private club. A chippy young lass from England remarked that she was not sure how private a club is that is listed in The Lonely Planet.....still, the first time I had to show my ID to order a drink in a long time. Same chirpy lass produced a friend's local ID card to get her drinks and no one noticed the difference. The lady mixologists were very professional, and churned out chocolate martinis with floating Maltesers and strawberry daiquiris served in glasses with frosted chocolate rims with relentless energy. They went through three containers of chocolate powder for the frosting in the time I drank one cocktail. The space, a former antique shop, was heaving with people and you literally felt the bones of bodies pressing against your back. We had a conversation with a happy Swedish visitor who kept on handing out red roses from the vase on the counter to his blonde compatriots. When asked if he liked visiting Hong Kong, he took a deep breath and said that during an earlier massage session, the masseuse kept on trying for what is termed 'a happy ending'...so I wondered what's the case with the roses then?

The morning after? A little dim and dry around the head...and a wistful thought upon my co-drinker's comment that perhaps the years between 40 and 50 are the best...so party girl, the best is yet to come! 

In search of happy gods in Repulse Bay

I was feeling disgruntled with my new life in Hong Kong and blaming it on the lack of open skies and feeling closed in by the spectacular view across Victoria Harbour through some gaps between 'big things', also called skyscrapers, that dwarf one's every step, being and breath. The special thing about this city is the continually changing perspectives as you walk the streets of buildings, vistas and slopes, a moving diorama. However, despite this visual pleasure and the welcome relief of shadows cast by tall buildings in the heat, it is as if they 'hang in space' and have a presence of just 'being there', displacing space.

The southern part of Hong Kong Island, facing the south china seas, has a different sensibility. It is more relaxed, a shangri-la or permanently happy land isolated from the outside world as James Hilton wrote of in The lost horizon (1933). At the end of the Repulse Bay seaside walkway, I found a happy god on whose plinth is written in gilded letters, the following inscription:

The old man from the moon is
a happy god in charge of
love and matrimony.
He ties the couple's legs with red
string, and their hearts with a crimson belt, and puts their names in the celestial register so that they will live happily ever after after.

This god is surrounded by many other mosaic gods and deities at the Tin Hau temple. Gaun Yin, the goddess of sympathy, compassion and mercy and Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea, or literally the queen of heaven, tower over the temple precinct. The story of Tin Hau goes that as a 13-year old, she met a Toaist priest who taught her how to predict the future, and help the sick and the weak. She supposedly traveled the seas on a reed mattress and saved people from drowning and thereby gathered the attribute as the goddess for safety on the seas. And it is here that I found peace and reason to be in Hong Kong - to collect stories from old men, happy gods, red strings and crimson belts.

The TIn Hau temple is also, appropriately, home to the Hong Kong Life Guard Club Training Headquarters. Behind Guan Yin and the temple, oddly filled with cold drink fridges, stands The Lily, the residential development designed by Norman Forster and Partners where a 3-bedroomed apartment costs HK$165,000 per month to rent. One is never far away from the West/East dichotomy in Hong Kong.

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.

Little things that make the world go round

A sunny, early evening in London after the first day of the Courtauld's Intersections: Architecture and Poetry conference brought welcome, fresh air after stuffy lecture theatre sessions. They operate the air conditioning till the speakers start and then have to put it off as it is too noisy! Can some philanthropist help this worthy institution out of their misery? We were all wilting from a lack of fresh air and the heat. However, there was an interesting talk by Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu who explained their design solutions drawing from natural geometries that kept some of us awake.

Outside, it was a glorious summer's day and people were running and splashing in the courtyard fountains surrounded by bronze Chinese zodiac animals. Liquids of another kind were flowing on the terrace overlooking the Thames. There was a very noisy tent from where drinks were served, but sensibly, the eastern side of the terrace was left open. A young Chinese girl sat at a table with four chairs - it was very busy and full - and I asked if we could share the table. She was very emphatic about not sharing, as she was waiting for her date! Amused, we managed to scrounge chairs from elsewhere. Nothing like sharing a drink in good company in beautiful surroundings. This little urban encounter made for a pleasant day.


Other little things that I picked up in London that give pleasure in China are blonde hair elastics that cannot be bought there for love or money and a naff-looking, curious silk powder foot spray that eliminates the need for those dreadful, nude, creeping liners in summer shoes. And another thing, back in Hong Kong, I am so grateful to block out the never-ending, reflecting, flashing lights of IM Pei's Bank of China Tower at night, not with an eye guard, but by drawing curtains.

To Mao or [not] to marry

This installation in the window of Lane Crawford's 'home and lifestyle store' of colourful Mao cherubs hovering above a rather grim-looking couple is by Beijing artist Qu Guangci.
These Maos may well ponder their presence in a shop that was started by two Scotsmen, Thomas Ash Lane and Ninian Crawford, in a bamboo structure on the Hong Kong waterfront in 1850. This leading specialty store promises the best of everything from around the world. The weightlessness of the suspended angels is echoed in an earlier series of birdman works by Guangci that was influenced by Italo Calvino's story The baron in the trees and the paintings of Bada Shanren (1624-1705).

Guangci is attracted to Calvino's sense of fantasy, aesthetic freedom and flexibility but in particular his use of 'lightness':    
I always endeavor to lessen the sense of heaviness: the heaviness of human beings, the heaviness of heavenly bodies, and the heaviness of cities.

The light, pop-like irreverence of the Mao cherubs belie the heaviness of the Cultural Revolution from which these figures stem. The heaviness of cities and human beings was reported in the South China Post of 19 May 2011:

A 22-year-old woman in a wedding is grabbed and hauled to safety by a community officer after she jumped from a window in a seven-storey residential building in Changchung, Jilin province. According to reports, the dramatic rescue took place after the woman's boyfriend of four years jilted her as they were making plans to get married. The woman did not suffer any injuries in the incident.

This suspended angel did not have a moment of lightness of being in the city.

http://www.artzinechina.com/display.php?a=834 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IwBULAQa3k
http://www.artzinechina.com/display_vol_aid375_en.html

The groom, the bride, the bridesmaid and Starbucks

Just about every walk through Hong Kong Park you bump into a bridal party of some sorts. Somehow it is always compelling to watch the scenario being played out. It could be the bride on her own, but mostly the groom and bride and a few attendants as you see here. This is not the wedding day, but what they call pre-wedding photography, and already the white high-heels of the girls are scuffed as they traipse through the garden, in search of  unusual locations. In these days, when your glasses fog up as you go outside from the humidity, the bride and bridesmaids have difficulty composing themselves lugging elaborate dresses around underneath the heavy layers of make-up. Perspiration drip from their faces. In fact this whole party was made-up, including the groom. I took some pictures of them and despite the heat they looked wonderful. I was wondering if they made two matching bouquets, one for the pre-wedding photographs and then the wedding day itself. Four bridesmaids sat in our local Starbucks after a grueling session in front of the cameras, now imagine that in London!

Talking about flowers, enormous bouquets are presented at weddings or for businesses celebrations with large A4-sized hand-made writs. Bigger is better seems to be the ethos and they get carted around on delivery trollies. To my London trained eye, used to endless variations of posies or hand-ties, these arrangements seem overwhelming in their composition and choice of blooms. That is till I landed in Happy Valley, that airy neighborhood with a village feel curving around the racecourse that has a sense of space, and saw two florists specializing in the ubiquitous tight bunch of harmonizing or contrasting flowers.           

Pillars propping up the city

Cities and societies are propped up by numerous structures and practices. Cheap labour from mainland China and elsewhere has been in endless supply in Hong Kong since the early colonial era and is intrinsic to its economy and ease of living. An agency for 'maids' displayed a window covered with these photographs - all the women were in the same dress and pose. These sheets with personal data, work experience and preferences are personal advertisements for their services. 'Hyacinth is a 36 year old married Roman Catholic woman with 3 teenage children.' In her interview appraisal, she scored 'good' in all categories, including her facial expression (the agency seemed to score no one as being excellent in any category). She seems a godsend for any household, and the 'simple massage' listed as one of her many capabilities would send any Hong Kong matron seeking a house helper in the opposite direction. Do personnel agencies elsewhere display information of this personal nature I wonder? Lisa Law wrote about the Filipina women in Hong Kong (2002), gathering in public spaces around the Central area on Sundays, when they meet in groups to talk, eat and just generally be sociable. The clutter of these gatherings in Chater Park and elsewhere irked the city fathers and big commerce alike in the past, and barricades were put up to control their access to the city's few public spaces. Since I have been here, I have seen Filipina women in all kinds of public spaces during their spare time. They turn public concrete spaces briefly into private spaces with hunched conversations over plastic containers filled with rice, and as far as I can see, chicken pieces, before they return to keep the household wheels running smoothly again for their employers.


During the summer when the typhoons arrive, great amounts of water come gushing down the steep, hilly slopes in the city and could cause landslides. All the slopes are covered in concrete and netting cover the soil surrounding the trees. Narrow maintenance steps are barred to the public and only maintenance workers have  access. Deep gulleys and enormous storm water canals channel rainwater down to the sea. Structures such as these pillars prop up highways that cut through the city and obliterate the flow between areas and public spaces. The Zoological and Botanical Gardens are cut in two by Albany Road. The park is isolated from the rest of the city and nearby Hong Kong Park by flowing, circular roads. Few pavements make it difficult for pedestrian to navigate this area.