“Fading Neon Lights: An Archive of Hong Kong’s Visual Culture” by Brian Sze-hang Kwok

Hong Kong (via Wikimedia Commons)

At last someone has found a practical application for virtual reality. Brian Kwok teaches design at Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University and he has been studying Hong Kong’s neon signs and the culture that surrounds them. It has convinced him that they should be preserved. But how? Kwok has a really difficult row to hoe, and he knows it full well.

Prof Kwok and some colleagues and students have been doggedly documenting Hong Kong’s remaining signs, racing against their demolition. Fading Neon Lights describes that work. In 1975, Hong Kong had about 80,000 neon signs, and in the days before air conditioning they accounted for about a third of the city’s power consumption. In 1989 a Japanese academic described Hong Kong’s streetscapes at night as “… like a picture drawn by a schizophrenic patient suffering from claustrophobia; the sky above the streets is being buried by a forest of signs.” At the time of Kwok’s survey there were still enough signs remaining that they were able to cover only the commercial districts of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon peninsula. There alone the project documented more than 450 still-functioning neon signs. As you might expect, signs are pictured on almost every page, crowding out the text. Fading Neon Lights is a quick read.

 

Fading Neon Lights: An Archive of Hong Kong’s Visual Culture, Brian Sze-hang Kwok, (City University of Hong Kong Press, March 2023)
Fading Neon Lights: An Archive of Hong Kong’s Visual Culture, Brian Sze-hang Kwok (City University of Hong Kong Press, March 2023)

Kwok bases his case for preservation on the argument that the panoply of illuminated signs found on some Hong Kong streets after dark was once a significant tourist attraction. He asserts that it could be again. Beyond that, he asserts that the signs qualify as an art form. Their designs are often artistic, and creating them requires rare craftsmanship. And he emphasizes that massed neon signs (with their light pollution) are part of Hong Kong’s heritage which anyone who grew up there values as an icon of their youth. He describes the signs as “an anchor of Hong Kong’s visual culture”.

Prof Kwok has little interest in today’s LED “neon” technology. LEDs are tiny point sources, but encased in plastic tubing they make the tube glow like a tube of electrified neon. They work at much lower voltage, and with no glass blowing they are much lighter and easier to build and repair. They also consume less power and last about 3 times as long as neon-in-glass. Unsurprisingly, LED technology is taking over.

If this all seems a bit too technical for your taste, don’t despair. Describing the research project doesn’t provide enough content to make a book, so Kwok supplements the story with a series of digressions which may better hold your interest. There’s a chapter on the history and principles of design. There’s another essay on urban planning. And Kwok devotes about 20 pages to the histories of some of Hong Kong’s districts, and he commits several pages to recounting his own experience growing up there as a child.

 

Teletype machines, ice-cooled refrigerators, even antique cars can be preserved, displayed and appreciated relatively easily, but neon signs present some special problems. They’re large, they’re heavy, they need high voltage power, and they are best viewed illuminated after dark. Some of the book’s illustrations convince that a vintage neon sign can be a sorry sight by the light of day. Kwok mentions a handful of neon sign museums in Europe and the United States, and he aspires to establish something similar in Hong Kong, but that seems unlikely in that crowded city.

Kwok’s ambition is admirable, but it’s likely that he’ll eventually have to accept virtual reality as the best available solution. With the many images of persisting and long-demolished signs at his disposal, he should be able to create a virtual scene that will give a museum visitor the impression of walking down Hong Kong’s Queen’s Road of the 1960s, crammed with famous signs, many raised virtually from the scrap heap. Kwok doesn’t acknowledge this in Fading Neon Lights, but it seems to be his best hope.


Bill Purves is a Hong Kong-based writer. He is the author of several books, including A Sea of Green: A Voyage Around the World of Ocean Shipping and China on the Lam: On Foot Across the People’s Republic.