Reviews & Articles

West Kowloon II: Where Life, Heritage & Culture Meet 55-57 Kweilin St, Sham Shui Po http://www.soco.org.hk/olwk2/index.htm until 10 August 2008 The Society of Community Organization (SoCO) has, over the last five years, mounted a series of impressive art exhibitions to highlight the inequities affecting Hong Kong’s poor and disadvantaged. This latest exhibition uses a beautiful old rundown tong lau, or low-rise shop house, in Sham Shui Po to house a variety of installation, photography, video and interactive artwork. Students of the University of Hong Kong have also mounted a fascinating overview of the architecture, people and businesses of Sham Shui Po and the alumni of New Asia College present the history of their school. Founded by intellectuals committed to education and the promotion of Chinese culture after fleeing China in 1949, the original site of New Asia College is in a next-door Kweilin Street tong lau. This influential school offered night classes and free education to the poor and expanded until its current location at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. This poignant exhibition is part-art and part-social action using Sham Shui Po’s unique urban landscape and the stories of people’s successes of dogged perseverance and hard work alongside the difficulties of unfortunate personal circumstance, illness, old age and simple bad luck. The exhibition however is shrouded by a conundrum. SoCO highlights Sham Shui Po’s organic growth, diversity and the dynamism of individual enterprise as the source for the area’s humanity and success, but there appears to be tacit support for the pending Urban Renewal Authority’s demolition of the area’s tong lau as a quick fix for the area’s poor housing stock. The exhibition, ironically, points to a better way. Preservation, refurbishment and maintenance of Sham Shui Po’s unique architecture would maintain existing communities and lessen other social and urban planning problems; and, rigid government social policies, such as the 7-year residency rule for eligibility to public housing, need an urgent overhaul. - John Batten.