Back to the future in Hong Kong

Thirty years ago I was 27 and moved to Hong Kong to work for three years - long story.  With beautiful symmetry, 27 years later I  return for a week wandering down memory lane - or multi-lane highway, depending on where I am at the time. 

So what's different?  Aside from  now being a middle aged woman and not a party girl in my late 20's?  In Hong Kong quite a lot, and strangely enough, not much. 

It's still a growing city and is unashamed of being so.  It builds high rise towers, roads, bridges, pedestrian overpasses, underground (MTR) lines and stations with no apology.  I suspect "consultation with the community" is an unknown concept, but equally there's little "not in my back yard" wowserism either.  Everyone expects progress so progress happens - stuff gets done and as a consequence the infrastructure works.  

This means it's easier than ever to get around.  The public transport system is excellent. Since I lived here the MTR lines have crept under the city  in every direction, including a direct express from the new airport on Lantau island, linked to the city via causeways.  This somewhat removes the excitement of landing between the apartments and washing lines that squeezed the old runway at Kai Tak, but it's certainly efficient, delivering you to the city in 24 minutes.  Taxis are cheap, as is travel in general and an octopus travelcard makes it very easy. Over 6 days travelling all over the Island and Kowloon including return trips to the airport, I spent less than $70NZ - in London that might get you a couple of days in Zone One, or a dozen trips on a Melbourne tram.

I am amazed at how clean the place has become  - not Singapore clean but very, very clean: the streets have no litter; the air is clean - no need for industrial strength cleanser on your face at day's end, and when you blow your nose, the output isn't black!  Public toilets are a positive revelation - it is all no touch hand cleaning: soap automatically dispensed, water on a sensor.  

Smoking must also have been banned: I can count on both hands the number of people I saw with cigarettes.  

However, bureaucracy has gone mad and there are signs everywhere forbidding everything.   

In this case,  near Po Lin Monastery, no alcohol or meat

Filipino maids gather on their day off

Wanchai is still the Wanch, but becoming a bit less so with the advent of a cafe and restaurant culture (a separate blog on Hong Kong eating is forthcoming). There are still seedy looking bars and dens of obvious iniquity, but these seem to be confined to the north side of Lockhart Road.  I walk past a long standing institution, The Old China Hand, on a Sunday morning and observe sweet, faced Thai and Filipino girls in short skirts giggling with (or at) ruddy faced, paunchy white men drinking sweaty pints of beer.  Across the street on the steps of a place called Players, a fight breaks out between Chinese men. I don't see any machetes, but am motivated to move along.

There are well in excess of 150,000 Filipino maids working in Hong Kong.  On Sunday, their day off, they meet up around Central and spend the day picnicking and chatting with their friends.  Early in the day they stake out their space using flattened  cardboard boxes, filling the areas in public and squares along the overhead pedestrian walkways that connect high rise office blocks and shopping malls.  

It all takes on the appearance of a convention for the homeless, which in essence is what they are as they leave their families to earn a living, by shopping, washing, cleaning and cooking for ex-pats and more well off locals families.  Domestic workers have no residency rights. If they leave and employer (or any employer leaves them) they have two weeks to find another job before having to leave the country.  In a recent court case  a maid, resident in Hong Kong for 17 years, tried to challenge the law which allows other ex-pats (in non domestic roles) permanent residence after seven years uninterrupted residency.  She failed.

Strange as it sounds, there are now more Chinese in Hong Kong.  Visitors from the mainland are now the greatest proportion of visitors, and it seems the hot attraction is infant formula.  In March 2013 the HK Government set an export limit of 1.8kg on the product.   Clearly not everyone got the memo if the women in a supermarket foyer packing multiple large tins of baby food into a suitcase were anything to go by. 

Yes, but what did you buy I hear you ask.  A bar of soap and six spoons.  Seriously.  One of the beauties of no longer working in a corporate environment means there are none of the associated wardrobe requirements: that leaves more money for hedonistic pleasures.......food blog forthcoming.

When is a farm not a farm?

When it is a New Zealand farm where the animals are yak, zebra and giraffe not cows and sheep; where the birds are emu and ostrich not hens; and where the main attraction is art, not agriculture. 

Bernar Venet's towering 27 metre tall 88.5° ARC x 8 is visible before you enter the gate to Gibbs Farm

In 1991 New Zealand businessman and entrepreneur  Alan Gibbs bought 1,000 acres overlooking the Kaipara harbour, 50 kilometres north of Auckland.  Over the past 20 plus years the land has been developed into a private sculpture park on a very grand scale.   Gibbs Farm is not only one of New Zealand's best kept secrets, it is one of the foremost sculpture parks in the world. .  

No kidding.   I  confess when I test this assertion by googling " foremost sculpture parks in the world" it doesn't pop up.  However, when a blogger's list of 10 extraordinary sculpture parks features the Lithuanian Museum of Ancient Bee-keeping, it tells me that's a search engine issue - it does nothing to dampen my certainty that Gibbs Farm is up there with the Storm King collection sited north of New York.  

In fact the Gibbs collection and Storm King feature several of the same internationally renown artists, including Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy and George Rickey.  Gibbs Farm collects works at a rate of about one a year and the sculptures tend to be unique and site specific.  In general the very large works can take several years to develop and install, and significant site landscaping is essential.  It must be a sculptor's dream to receive a phone call from Alan Gibbs, as it appears money is no object.  On the contrary, it is simply an instrument to deliver your vision. 

Te Tuhirangi Contour 

If you think you have seen large scale installations at art galleries, think again.  

In recent years I have seen two Richard Serra works: one in the Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim in Bilbao - this building is a stunning sculpture in itself  - and the other in rather less prepossessing, but still brilliant, MoMA in New York (yes, I know, I'm such a name dropper).  

Te Tuhirangi Contour  from above

At Gibbs Farm, Serra's 252 metre long, 6 metre high  Te Tuhirangi Contour snakes across the curves of the land and dwarfs both earlier works.  Its 56 Corten steel plates lean out by 11 degrees from vertical and you feel simultaneously protected and vulnerable standing in their lee.  


Yet when you climb the hill above, those tonnes of steel look no more daunting than a piece of fabric tossed carelessly by some giant hand. 


One of my favourite works is Neil Dawson's Horizons.  The arty blurb says the work suggests "a giant piece of corrugated iron blown in from a collapsed water tank on some distant farm".  More prosaically I'd say it suggests a giant empty fruit bowl nestled on top of the hill. 

Neil Dawson's Horizons

As with all the works, the shape and orientation change:  you see them from a distance and then the form alters as you close in and move around each work.  

This is never more true than with the stunning red skewed trumpet that is Anish Kapoor's Dismemberment, Site 1.  This massive (85 metres long, 8m by 25m at each end) installation inserts into the landscape and stretches through the hill into the valleys. 

Dismemberment, Site 1 viewed from the western side

viewed to the east and Kaipara Harbour

Despite it being a rather dull, overcast day when we visit, it is a singular experience.  Gibbs Farm is a place where words such as awesome, spectacular, amazing and incredible are truisms not hackneyed expressions.  It is easy to spend several hours walking up and down the slopes to view different works and stumble on another piece hidden from view by a hill or corner. 

It is terrific that Gibbs chooses to open the Farm to the public one day a month for several months each year.  You need to book through the website (which is unfortunately undergoing a revamp as I write this) and the truly great part about this is, to visit is totally free. There is no entry fee, no request for donations, simply no charge!   

Yes, we might cynically suggest that it's no skin off his nose, given he lives in London now; and that over the years he has made a good part of his fortune thanks to the New Zealand taxpayer and so should dispense his largesse - in the early 1990s Gibbs and his business partner were the brokers for the public float of Telecom, a deal worth $4.25 billion which also saw them take a 5% holding in the company.  Nonetheless, he doesn't have to let hoi polloi onto his property.  And you do have to admire the passion of a man who has stuck his neck on the line many times in the pursuit of his dreams - and not always successfully.   We should just be delighted by his patronage of the arts - I am, and  plan to return to the Farm and again be awed by his grand design.

Rakaia by Peter Nicholls "a response in title and braided form to the Rakaia river, near the birthplace of Alan Gibbs".