Beautiful Junk
There's a fine line between retro and rubbish. Yvonne Young sifts the city's cast-off packaging for design treasures.
Hong Kong is a throwaway society. It's hardly surprising given two of our most noted characteristics: our love of shopping and teeny-weeny apartments. For most of us, the only way to make room for new stuff is to throw out old stuff. But today's trash is tomorrow's treasure and people with an eye for good design have been hanging on to memory-provoking packaging and everyday items. We asked artists, photographers, interior designers and academics to identify yesterday's beautiful rubbish.
Charles Ng
The chairman of the Hong Kong Designers' Association and director of brand consultancy MCL, Ng is currently working on a series of public signs and warnings using the icon "bitter-melon man," which he hopes to display in the MTR. He also collects packaging, mainly tin boxes from the 1930s-50s.
"Whenever I see junk I want to buy it, to pick up some fragments of memories that we might not otherwise pay attention to. As a designer, I find these products are useful for my creativity, prodding my memory and getting to know how our predecessors lived.
"The core of old Hong Kong design follows traditional Chinese design prior to the establishment of the PRC in 1949. With its geographic location, Hong Kong tended to be influenced by Guangdong. As for graphics, we tended towards iconic images such as 'Double Girls' from Kwong Sang Hong. Post-war, the open-trading policy encouraged a huge influx of western goods, which shifted consumption patterns [away from Chinese goods]. Because of this, coupled with a later desire not to be influenced by the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong people completely changed their taste.
"In this computerized era we have a different notion of visual culture, which is perhaps the main obstacle preventing the new generation from understanding old designs. To them, graphics are not generated by lifestyle. They are used to visuals that are always larger than life. This creates a discrepancy between what you see and how you live."
Simon Go
A photojournalist with “Next Magazine,” Go has a passion for old medicine packages and has produced a book about them titled "Hong Kong Apothecary: A Visual History of Chinese Medicine Packaging."