Dominique Perregaux gets behind the South Island Cultural District

One spring night in 2004, gallery owner Dominique Perregaux and an artist called Fabien Verschaere embarked on a tour of Mong Kok's sex clubs.

The excursion happened to coincide with the year's first amber rainstorm so Verschaere, who is French and has achondroplastic dwarfism, and Perregaux, who is Swiss and had been in Hong Kong for just eight weeks, spent much time splashing up and down dank stairwells in Shanghai Street and Temple Street.

Verschaere was hoping to be artistically inspired by what he called "Hong Kong's hot places". The rain, however, was chilly, the thunder was deafening, and the girls were, wisely, rather thin on the ground.

I know because I was there, reporting on proceedings; and I can tell you that apart from the geographical foreplay, action was mostly confined to massaging joysticks in amusement arcades, one of which was so appalling - even by Mong Kok standards - that three alarmed policemen tried to discourage us from entering.

Since then, Perregaux, 41, has survived worse storms. In 2008, he had brain surgery in Hong Kong to remove a tumour. In 2009, he decided to close his Art Statements gallery, which was then in Sheung Wan. He moved to an industrial space in Tin Wan, on south side of Hong Kong Island, but his energies were focused on Tokyo, where he opened a gallery in November 2010.

"Luckily," he says, "or probably unluckily, in March 2011 there was the earthquake and the Fukushima [nuclear reactor leak]."