Old Hong Kong remembered; bas-relief at Sai Ying Pun MTR station strikes a chord
The stunning 3D artwork by Hong Kong-based British artist Louise Soloway Chan was a labour of love and a celebration of Hong Kong’s disappearing street life
One mild night in early January, a small group of people gathers at Exit B1 of Sai Ying Pun MTR station at 12.30am. It’s midweek, the city’s winding down and only a trickle of travellers is coming up the escalator and disappearing into First Street. The group, all wearing hard hats and what’s referred to as PPE (personal protective equipment), i.e. high-visibility vests, waits. They have the patient look of men who are used to waiting.
The one woman among them is Louise Soloway Chan. She’s an artist who has lived in Hong Kong since 1994 and, six years ago, she submitted a proposal to create a series of bas-reliefs, depicting local life in the streets around Sai Ying Pun, for the then-unbuilt station. The final installation of that artwork is about to take place.
Soloway Chan is English and her husband, Reynold, a real-estate investment adviser, is British-born Chinese. Her work consists of 12 bas-reliefs. Eight of them are already in place; the final four arrived at the depot this morning from the factory in Huizhou, in Guangdong province, where she spent the best part of three hot, cold and very dusty years toiling over them.
Because of their size – 220cm x 210cm, each weighing 280kg – it’s impossible to bring them through the station entrances or by lift. They can only be delivered on one of the goods trains normally used to transport track and station equipment. It’s been booked for a strict time slot: the last public train from Sai Yin Pun leaves at 1.08am and the first train is at 6.03am. The MTR Corporation has stipulated that any night work must cease by 4am.
I always say we’re a transit system, not an art gallery. I want the art to work very, very hard to help people move around by creating a unique station identity
There are also the constraints imposed by the PSD – that would be the Platform Screen Doors (the internal world of the MTR, as its very name suggests, is ruled by unfamiliar clusters of the alphabet). Transferring each enormous panel from the goods train through the PSD at SYP is going to require its own nimble artistry, and Soloway Chan is contractually liable for any damage caused to MTR property. This adds a certain jitteriness to proceedings.