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.