Hong Kong artist Kristy Lau is taking her inspiration from the street life which surrounded her during childhood and creating a delightful range of t-shirts. Now she’s preparing for her first exhibition – at Hong Kong’s Fringe Club. You bet Your Girl Reporter will be on the scene. The only question is, what to wear?
The Hong Kong of my youth had little time for nostalgia. In its brief and sometimes turbulent history the city for many years lived relentlessly in the present. The future was uncertain, the past a stepping stone to the here and now.
Perhaps that’s true of every generation and Hong Kong, due to its compressed physical space and unique history, expresses a hyper-reality common to every great city.
Many grand old buildings of the colonial era were swept away in the name of progress and their loss is still mourned in some quarters. The old post office, the Hong Kong Club, the original Hongkong and Shanghai Bank building – it’s not hard to find people in Hong Kong yearning for the monuments of a lost age.
But bricks and mortar are not the only keepers of memory, nor do they necessarily reflect the lives of the ordinary people who built the Hong Kong of today. Their world was lived on the streets.
Kristy is preserving an aspect of the past that might otherwise be forgotten and she’s doing it in the most modern style – in her unique hand-painted t-shirts depicting the very ordinary life that any Hongkonger of her generation will recognise.
“I paint my memories,” Kristy said. “I used to sit on those little wooden chairs when I went to dai pai dong with my dad, I bought a bottle of Green Spot orange every day after school and when I was four years old I watched the King of Kowloon for half an hour write his family tree on the wall under a bridge in Kowloon City.”
The King of Kowloon, subject of one of Kristy’s most intricate works, was a graffiti artist named Tsang Tsou-choi whose work has largely been destroyed through time and renovation.
Tsang spent most of his career, which stretched over 40 years, vilified and dismissed as a public nuisance. His distinctive graffiti usually outlined his ancestral claim to Kowloon, which he said had belonged to his grandfather, and would conclude with the line: “Down with the Queen of England.”
The King of Kowloon is the most colourful character in the street life captured by Kristy in her work. Less flamboyant, but of critical importance in a largely illiterate population, was the letter writer who provided the necessary link with family in China.
“Almost every day while I waited for the school bus I would talk to Uncle Wong, our local letter man. He would write letters for people separated from their families, he would help to deliver them and when the replies came he would read them aloud.
“I’ll never forget the day he read a letter to an old lady which made her cry tears of happiness.”
Your Girl Reporter stumbled across Kristy’s work on Facebook and was smitten by the attention to detail and the haunting atmosphere of her images. I was in Brisbane, Australia and a long way from Hong Kong.
Now that I’m back in my old home town, the Hong Kong evoked by Kristy’s images can feel even further away. Life is still lived very much on the streets, but the people and places she recalls are largely gone, swept away in the whirl of modern living.
Her work is not the stuff of picture postcards but the fabric of a time when life here was hard and gritty for most of its inhabitants and pleasures were simple.
Of all the trimmings of nostalgia that are out there in abundance for those of us seeking a taste of the past, Kristy’s work carries a visceral meaning.
In a world where even Green Spot orange doesn’t taste the same, it’s a delight to journey back to those days through her work. And I’ll raise an imaginary bottle of the old Luk Bo to that.
Kristy Lau’s Hand-Painted Old Hong Kong Exhibition will be at the Fringe Club, in Hong Kong’s historic Ice House building at the junction of Wyndham Street and Ice House Street from 2-11 June 2018 in The Vault. Your Girl Reporter will be on the scene.
Further reading:
‘King of Kowloon’ deserves better – a South China Morning Post editorial from May 2017 on another piece of Hong Kong gone.
Kristy’s Old Hong Kong Theme Store – more of Kristy’s work on Facebook
© Maria Spackman 2018
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