Che remembers when, 20 years ago, it was home to a thriving cluster of art studios and performance spaces. “There was a lot of energy,” he says. “That was the first artists’ village of its kind in Hong Kong. People were really hoping it could last. But that did not happen.”

Oil Street is just a speck on the map, a two-lane road that runs for less than 300 metres (1,000 feet), but its legacy can be felt all over Hong Kong. The story begins in 1897, when the Dutch Oil Company – the precursor to Royal Dutch Shell – built a kerosene depot and pier on the shore at North Point, which at the time was a rural hinterland popular for its beaches.

A decade later, the depot was joined by the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, which had been looking for a new home after its clubhouse was destroyed by a typhoon in 1906. It commissioned a wood-framed abode in the Arts and Crafts architectural style, with Chinese tile roofs, brick and plaster walls and generous balconies overlooking the harbour. When it opened in 1908, the Post hailed it as “an indication of gratifying enterprise, energy and skill”.

The club was regarded as a good place for “the odd spot of gin” and “a fine fresh breeze”, according to the Post. It hosted regattas and fun fairs, including one in 1913 that was reported as having a coconut shy, a British game in which players throw a ball to try to knock a coconut off a wooden post.

In 1919 the Hong Kong Electric Company built a huge power station nearby. Its presence is recalled in the street names Power Street and Electric Road; Oil Street was named in 1931 to reflect the presence of the Shell depot that had opened three decades earlier.

In 1933, the government announced its intention to reclaim the shore in front of the yacht club, and so the club’s 308 members began the hunt for a new clubhouse location. The club’s management committee raised the monthly membership fee from 50 cents to HK$5, which earned it enough to move to Kellett Island, an old naval outpost off the coast of Causeway Bay, where it remains today.

With the yacht club gone, the government took over its old headquarters and converted it into a storage facility. In 1953 it announced plans to build an adjacent cemetery depot and “farewell pavilion” next door, which outraged nearby residents.

They organised a petition against the project, arguing that people in the neighbourhood would be disturbed by Buddhist monks and nuns playing funeral music, and by mourners who would “wail and lament aloud at all times of the day and night”. Most tellingly, the petition said local superstitions would cause the values of the surrounding properties to plummet.

The neighbourhood’s pleas fell on deaf ears and the cemetery depot was soon built, along with a nine-storey government warehouse that opened in 1956. It was these new structures that would eventually provide a home to a generation of enterprising artists.

By the late 1990s, the government had stopped using the Oil Street site and it was put on the market. But when the Asian financial crisis hit in 1998, the government suspended all sales of its own property. The old Oil Street warehouse was instead rented out at a bargain price of HK$2.50 per square foot, which drew the attention of artists, architects and performers.

One of the first to arrive was Choi Yan-chi, who founded 1a Space along with fellow artists Oscar Ho and Hiram To. They were struck by the building’s 14-foot (4-metre) ceilings and open floor plans – exactly the opposite of the cramped village houses and commercial spaces Hong Kong artists had to work with at the time. (Artists had not yet moved to the industrial buildings of Fo Tan and Wong Chuk Hang; in the 1990s they were still being used as factories.)

“Oil Street was the very first space in Hong Kong that had the style and atmosphere of a loft,” Choi told the now-defunct Muse magazine in 2014. “People enjoyed going there – their eyes would just open so wide.”

It was unlike anything Hong Kong had seen before. It was always a myth that Hong Kong was a cultural desert. There have been talented artists working in the city for many years; they just never had access to enough space to truly indulge their creative spirit. Oil Street changed that. “Activities may include an impromptu performance-art piece, a celebrity photo shoot, a rooftop DJ session or a free painting lesson,” reported the Post in 1998.

It did not last long. The next year, the government was eager to put the old depot back up for sale and it sent an eviction notice to the artists. In response, they banded together into a self-organised lobby group called Save Oil Street and generated enough pressure that the government agreed to resettle them in a former cattle depot in To Kwa Wan in urban Kowloon on the other side of Victoria Harbour.

The new spaces just weren’t the same. The dank, stuffy abattoir had none of the creative energy of Oil Street. “It was deadly quiet,” recalls artist Leung Chi-wo. “It was quite depressing compared to what I saw on Oil Street.”

Meanwhile, the old warehouse on Oil Street remained empty for more than a decade. It was only recently redeveloped into a hotel and luxury housing estate.

“There is of course an element of nostalgia in the whole story of Oil Street as it is retold again and again, but its relevance is immense,” says Michelle Wong, a researcher at the Asia Art Archive, which maintains an archive of materials collected from Oil Street.r

“The story of Oil Street is not only about the land issues and injustices that Hong Kong has struggled with continuously, it is also about how artists and citizens have found ways to be together, nurture companionship and creative expression regardless of the times they are in.”

Today, art has returned to Oil Street, albeit in a less freewheeling setting. Oi! has become a popular gathering spot for neighbours since it opened in 2013. “We want the community to participate in the process of making exhibitions,” says curator Ivy Lin. “It is a little different from a museum because it is a bottom-up model.”

The space is currently undergoing expansion, with a new two-storey building that will house two 1,500 square foot galleries set to open next year, along with public space that will be accessible around the clock.

It’s a bit of a throwback to the artists’ village of 20 years ago, when Lin was organising a biennial exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art. “That year we received a lot of large-scale artworks for the first time – and it was because of this space,” she says.

“We had the idea to change this old building into an art space because of that piece of history. It’s a history we treasure very much.”