City Lofts and Hong Kong's Essential Architectural Pornography

City Lofts has a trendy web site, made up of cut and pastes of old bits of Hong Kong. "Modern Living in Hong Kong's Historic Buildings" they call it. I’m fucked if I know where they found this stuff, but it is very careful editing that put all this shit together.

I’ve lived all over Hong Kong, and I take photographs. While this website is only a pastiche of little pieces like post boxes and old wooden doors with bits of faded calligraphy, and some brickwork, it’s highly misleading because there simply is no old Hong Kong left in the areas where City Lofts have their studios.

Face it, Hong Kong’s rapacious greed for a fast buck means anything of historic or aesthetic value has long since been pulled down – sorry, ‘redeveloped’ or ‘enhanced,’ usually with a 50-storey airconditioned fuck-ugly skyscraper designed by an epileptic crayon-wielding two-year-old on an acid trip.

The result is a smog-soaked cross between a building site and a multi-storey car park, the kind of place that gives financiers raging hard-ons because it is constantly being rebuilt, and that needs money, but it's also a place that needs heavy Photoshopping and an army of spin doctors to make it seem appealing.

Of course, most tourists who visit Hong Kong are wowed by the size of the buildings, but it’s all a bit like looking at freak porn penises. Once you get past the open-mouthed ‘how on earth did she, no, that can’t be real’ factor, there’s not much to say. People have big penises, people have sex with big penises, men with small penises and fragile egos build big buildings. So what? It’s all frightfully dull, but since most people don’t stay in Hong Kong long enough to get bored by its fundamental pornography, they leave feeling itchy and wanting to masturbate. All part of the city’s energy.

Don’t believe me? Try the Sun Yat Sen walk, it’s hilarious. The tour can be summarised thus: “On this site was a building once where Sun Yat Sen had a cup of tea.”

Repeat numerous times.

There’s nothing left of anywhere where Sun Yat Sen sat down his teacup because Hong Kong’s landlords, and their financiers with raging hard-ons, have torn it all down and replaced it with marble-coated buildings that have porticos like vast urinals. If this were England, the whole place would reek of piss because the drunks would be using the porticos as urinals, but since it’s China it merely reeks of a dull and witless ostentation.

Unaware of how cretinous it was being, and desperate to tempt tourists to Hong Kong by claiming the city had a cultural side, the Hong Kong government initiated the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Walk a few years back. Aware that the city had once briefly housed the father of modern China, but unperturbed by the absence of any of the sites where he sipped tea, they ploughed forward with their plan. The result is a series of plaques on various dirty street corners that tell tourists that once upon a time, before the bulldozer and the wrecker's ball, there was a building here where someone who became famous had a cup of tea.

Not any more though.

There's nothing of substance there, which was my first thought when I saw City Loft's website.

Spring arrives in Hong Kong

Spring has arrived. In Hong Kong, the changing season is not heralded by the return of nesting birds in brilliant plumage, but by the return of chicks in insanely short skirts.

I am reminded of the fabulous Patsy Stone line from Ab Fab: “One more inch and the world’s your gynaecologist.”

The city’s ablaze with womens’ legs in an assortment of micro-minis that might be handkerchiefs, and even this old fossil – thrice-divorced and short on both breath and libido – finds a certain youthful lust, dull but distant, emerging through the rising swamp heat of smog and early spring humidity.

Being old, and white, my eyes must of course be averted from the sight of so much beauty, particularly the beauty of youth. Being old, and white, one is already a pervert (haam saap) by default, a racial stereotype one must always guard against.

However, today, emerging out of the MTR, Hong Kong’s hyper-efficient underground system – which like all public architecture in Hong Kong has all the functional beauty of a municipal toilet – I stand on the escalator and am confronted with a wall of tits, advertising Triumph bras designed to enhance cleavage.



The tits rise in size as the escalator ascends – clearly someone thought this through, because we swell from an A cup at the bottom of the short ride to a D cup at the top.

Of course these are Western breasts, because despite the fact that ten years ago you would not have seen such images pasted on Hong Kong walls (I know of which I speak, because I used to write copy for Triumph in Hong Kong), it is clear that Chinese women do not have boobs. Or perhaps more accurately, Chinese women’s tits cannot be shown on the municipal toilet walls of the Hong Kong MTR. They can be plastered across the pages of the haam saap mags that are on full display on every street corner cigarette vendors stall, but they cannot be displayed on the walls of the underground. Chinese tits are for wanking to; Western tits are for selling bras.

This presumably is one of those “conundrums of the East” that travel writers crap on about at length in tawdry books and tedious column inches.

Tired after a long day of massacring the English language, I find myself dully, disinterestedly gazing at this parade of tits, but noting that 10 years ago this would not be possible. What most fascinates me is that they have chosen for some reason to use a simpering pervert in a bellboy suit to point out the boobs. He looks for all the world like the sort of man who lurks in chatrooms and might be seen on the nightly news, arrested in Thailand or Cambodia.

Presumably, sub-consciously, the ad exec who created this ad has chosen a man who most resembles a drooling Western pervert to wave his hand at tits.

Dully amused by my own meanderings, at the top of the escalator I happen to glance left and catch the eye of an older local woman scowling at me as she passes on the down escalator. Yes, I was smiling. Yes, I have confirmed her mundane housing estate preconceptions: all Westerners are dirty perverts who spend their evenings wanking like monkeys.

And in the instant our eyes meet I want to tell her that we should go for coffee. Over coffee I would tell her that I have never had a breast fetish, in fact, I see breasts as rather biological, designed for nursing. If there is an attraction, it is to this biological need for maintenance of my progeny through a woman capable of providing abundant milk. I have in fact always been attracted to legs, and only look at the walls to avoid looking at legs during the spring season. I would tell her that I am old and rheumy, that sex is entirely academic, and I would ask if she would like to share a chocolate pastry, which is as close to sex as I can get these days. “Besides,” I would say, “these are Western tits darling. I’m allowed.”

Later we would walk along the harbour front, and she would tell me of the poverty of her childhood, and of how Hong Kong once was not so long ago.

The gulf between East and West is not so vast, I think, but it lingers and lengthens as she descends, and I rise out of the tunnel and into Hong Kong’s perennial neon light, off to buy bread and beans in the supermarket for my tea.