Designs on Hong Kong's uniqueness
It is Friday night at the China Club, and a chanteuse clad in shimmering aquamarine coos love songs in Putonghua while a pianist in tails plays a grand piano. It might be a set from Temptress Moon, a mid-1990s film directed by Chen Kaige and inspired by nostalgia for Shanghai in the 1930s. Or it might be the carefully crafted, ironic vehicle of one of Hong Kong's leading design entrepreneurs, David Tang Wing-cheung.
The retro Shanghai fad seems dated now, but it was cutting edge when Mr Tang launched the China Club in 1991, and the design gestalt he created has so many copycats on the mainland it is a wonder that he survived. What would Mr Tang do today if he invented a nightclub and restaurant based on Hong Kong? Would it feature Canto-pop or men in kilts? Is there such a thing as contemporary Hong Kong style?
My companion at the China Club, Kai-yin Lo, an art historian and jewellery designer, has spent much of her career answering the last question. Most of the time, she fights an uphill battle. This week, for example, she is serving up Hong Kong's sensibility to its smart rival Shanghai, with Hong Kong's first big cultural festival on the mainland. Opening today in Shanghai's Grand Theatre, Hong Kong Culture Week will include such anodyne favorites as Swan Lake, performed by the Hong Kong Ballet. But it will also attempt to generate a buzz over Hong Kong style, which Ms Lo believes is indivisible from its business culture.
Her contribution to the Shanghai festival is an exhibition and documentary, called Creative Hong Kong. Interviews with 27 Hong Kong designers present the case for the compatibility of Hong Kong's commercial sensibility and design. While the classic aristocratic view in both China and the west frowns on art for the sake of commercial success, it is simply a reality for Hong Kong designers. 'People are really coming to terms with what we have, our material culture,' Ms Lo said. 'We should live with it and make it thrive, and then we thrive with it.'
Hong Kong design has yet to get to the point of setting global trends, according to Ms Lo, 'but we're trying'. She argues that Hong Kong's comparative advantage in design lies in its political and economic freedom and absence of barriers to globalisation. 'For design to be innovative, you need to connect with the world,' she said. On the mainland, 'they haven't seen enough of the world to know how to connect. This is where we still have a niche - but they are catching up fast'.
Ms Lo's argument that the soul of Hong Kong design is business might remain hard to pin down were it not for a new book from the Hong Kong Design Centre. Designed in Hong Kong features items ranging from 'garlic lights' designed by Kith Tsang using real garlic skin, and graphics employing red, white and blue market bags by Stanley Wong, to Watson Water's hand-friendly bottles, designed by Freeman Lau Siu-hong. The collection includes mood-enhancing light switches, the interior decor of a leading herbal shop, and Ms Lo's elegant jewellery, crafted from jade beads and other gleanings from Hong Kong's antique galleries. The objects may be utilitarian, but they radiate an exuberant, street smart, irreverent style that collectively could not come from anywhere other than Hong Kong.
The issue of style relates, however indirectly, to deeper questions. Is it possible to cobble together an identity based on the city's fractured history, fluid population and legacy institutions of common law and the free market? Oddly enough, the development of design culture in Hong Kong may be a barometer, tapping the same promising yet incongruous materials that shape its soul.
Edith Terry is a writer based in Hong Kong
