Last weekend, I was riding the tram (I know – a dead giveaway that I’m new here and have a kid under five) when I noticed some old lettering on a building I’ve passed dozens of times. It was the name of a stamp company that occupied the space decades ago. There’s a lot of that in Hong Kong: traces of the past that fade into the background, until something makes you look again.
In a way, this issue’s cover story picks up where last week’s feature on Hong Kong’s tiles left off. Both explore the fragments of design history still visible in the city, if you know where to look. This week, Paul French pieces together what’s left of Hong Kong’s flirtation with art deco. In Kowloon’s Kadoorie Hill, a cluster of houses from the 1930s still shows the clean lines and modern ideals of the time – light, air and a new kind of domestic ease. It’s a thoughtful dive into how the city once imagined its future. Though these days, bougainvillea climbs alongside CCTV cameras.
In Mui Wo, Annemarie Evans visits artist Jessica Zoob, who paints vast, luminous canvases out of a former hardware shop that she’s turned into a studio-gallery. Her art unfolds in layers – both literal and emotional – as she builds up colour and scrapes it back down again. Now, 25 years into her fine-arts career, she’s planning to give away 25 works to 25 causes later this year.
Over in South Korea, Cameron Dueck checks into a Buddhist mountainside temple to try seonmudo, a meditative martial art that blends monastic discipline with physical intensity. What he finds is a kind of rebellion against modern momentum: morning silence, repetition and 108 prostrations. It’s both exhausting and quietly transformative.
Meanwhile, back in Hong Kong, street dance is having a moment. Joyce Yip covers this year’s Red Bull Dance Your Style university qualifier and the growing momentum around street dance in the city. What started in community centres and as youth programmes is increasingly drawing the interest of institutions, sponsors and even museums. The irony isn’t lost on me, but the result is a more supported creative community, and one that’s gaining room to grow.
In My Life, we hear from activist investor and data transparency advocate David Webb. Through his site, Webb-site.com, he’s spent decades holding Hong Kong’s institutions to account. Now, facing terminal illness, he reflects on what it means to hand that work over, and how to exit with clarity and care.
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