Sights and Sounds

Hong Kong: Art, Lunch with the Imam, Custom Tailoring

Hong Kong Museum of Art

After a fantastic $15USD all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at the YMCA (eggs, bacon and waffles, oh my!  Not to mention all the fresh fruit!), I headed for the Hong Kong Museum of Art, just across Salisbury Rd.  Of course, the space and collection at the museum couldn’t rival something like the Art Institute of Chicago, but they did have an excellent collection on display, more than worth the $10HKD cost.  They had several displays of older Chinese art, including a collection of traditional Chinese scrolls on display, some of which were stupendous in their level of detail, and also an extensive collection of Chinese antiquities showcasing nearly every style of traditional Chinese ceramic and glazing techniques.  I found the scrolls uniformly beautiful and interesting, but the ancient cermics weren’t really to my taste—I just don’t much care who introduced lead to the glazing process, when they did it, or what the results were—I’d rather watch paint dry.  

They also had some contemporary Chinese works on display.  First a collection of installation pieces inspired by modern city life, including a response to SARS (it left a deep and lasting imprint of fear on the Chinese psyche apparently; I had all but forgotten about it), a paen to the folding bed (a staple of Hong Kong housing projects for decades), and my personal favorite Famiglia Grande a set of 4 “mobile sleeping units” designed as a response to the financial crisis of 2009, to allow the recently-rich to live temporarily on the streets with some degree of comfort and style.  That’s not to say I’d actually want to occupy one of t he units, but they are beautiful and I appreciated the artist’s sense of humor.

The other collection of contemporary works was a large number of canvases by Wu Guanzhong, most of which had been recently donated by the artist himself.  There wasn’t one precise style to his paintings, though I would say they all came in somewhere within the abstract-impressionistic spectrum; while I liked most of his paintings, the little poems of inscriptions that accompanied them all were my favorite; Wu Guanzhong is a funny and insightful man.

Kowloon Park & Mosque

It’s a short walk from the Museum of Art to Kowloon Park and the Kowloon Mosque.  Because the mosque is on the near side of the park, I decided to check it out before walking through the rest of the park.  After slipping off my flip-flops and taking a quick look through the main prayer room, I was going to leave when a man, who turned out to be the mosque’s imam, asked me if I would take some English literature on islam from him.  Not wanting to be ingracious—and always interested in learning something new—I accepted and folled him to his office, where he practically insisted that I share his lunch with him.  I tried to politely decline, not wanting to be a burden, but he told me “I have more than I need and you haven’t eaten yet, it is fate,” so I eagerly polished of what was left of a fried roti-like bread and some sort of spicy vegetable paste.  The amount of real generosity I have experienced in others during this trip has been overwhelming, wonderful not only because it has helped me stretched my already thin traveling budget but also because it’s a reminder that your own kindness and generosity are likely to be repaid, if not directly then by fate at some point down the line.

After lunch I spent an hour or so wandering through Kowloon Park.  It’s a big and mostly beautiful park, although there are surprisingly few large, open spaces.  Rather than being one or two large green fields like Central Park, Lincoln Park or most other large urban parks in the states, Kowloon Park is a dense mixture of fountains, hedge mazes, terraces, playgrounds and aviary enclosures.  This layout provided an interesting mix of things to see and do, but I would have liked at lease one large grassy field to sit and read or toss a Frisbee on. My cynical side thinks that this must have been a conscious thought by the Hong Kong authorities, thereby depriving people of a convenient, photogenic place for large gatherings and demonstrations; if this were mainland China I would be certain, but since it’s Hong Kong I only suspect it may be the case.

Custom Tailoring

In my previous post, I know that I said I had been avoiding all the hawkers along Nathan St. offering “very good tailors” because, well, you usually get what you pay for.  However, I did a bit of research and decided that a stop at Bobby’s Fashions, one of the more reputable tailors in Kowloon, would be my last stop before picking up my bags and leaving for the airport.  After taking a look at their materials and haggling a bit on the price (I love how almost everything in China is negotiable), I walked away with a blue pin-striped suit and a navy blazer both of super 150 wool, two shirts and two ties, with shipping back to the states, all for about $600USD.  Something of comparable quality in the states would run $2000 or more, so how could I afford not to do it?  Depending on how happy I am with it, I will probably order another suit once I get home now that they have my measurements.