It was never just about neon, that flashy, consumerist cantilevered structure over the streets of Hong Kong advertising pawn shops, mooncake bakeries, saunas and shark fin soup shops.
Because while the government's crackdown on neon signs is driven by environmental and safety concerns, the campaign evokes the demise of Hong Kong itself.
Many of the tourists and foreign residents have left.
The Hongkongers have also left. More than 110,000 permanent residents left last year, and the City's population of people worth more than $30 million fell by 23 percent, data from government and wealth surveys show.
Their departure, a quarter of a century after the territory returned from British to Chinese rule, has been driven by the territory's economic decline and a sharp decline in political rights.
Those who remain in Hong Kong are polarized between those who fear that the communist leadership in Beijing is destroying what made the place special — such as a free press and an independent judiciary — and those who believe that people here have always put up with the whims of those who are. in charge.
Since 2020, a national security law penalizes acts considered threatening to the State. For this reason, students and former legislators are in prison.
Hong Kong filmmaker Anastasia Tsang's directorial debut, “A Light Never Goes Out,” is about a family dealing with the death of a neon sign maker. The film is an elegy to a dying craft that could also be a requiem for something greater.
Since 2021, when he shot the film, many of the neon signs he used as a backdrop have disappeared.
Cardin Chan operates Tetra Neon Exchange, a group dedicated to preserving decommissioned signs. She estimates that tens of thousands of signs, mostly neon, have been removed in the last decade, since the Department of Buildings began a crackdown on unauthorized structures. Some businesses voluntarily replaced neon with cheaper LED displays.
Chan speaks to those who received takedown notices and documents the visual history of his craft. Pawn shops advertise with silhouettes of bats holding coins because the word for the winged mammal sounds like “fortune.” Symbols were once important to customers who couldn't read.
“Neon is a kind of emblem of the City, an embodiment of the stories of Hong Kong,” Chan said. “But it's not just neon that is undergoing a transformation. He is the whole City, isn't he?”
The art of neon—bending glass tubes filled with neon and other inert gases—came to Hong Kong, in part, from Shanghai. After the communists prevailed in mainland China in 1949, millions of refugees fled to the colony. In the 1970s, the streets vibrated with neon-tinged businesses.
When Jive Lau became interested in the craft, only a few neon masters were active, compared to a maximum of about 400.
For Peter Tse, a 20-foot neon sign symbolized the longevity of his Tai Tung bakery, which survived the Japanese occupation during World War II. Now 90, Tse has survived the cartel, which was dismantled last year. They told him he was too big and too old. “It lasted more than 50 years,” he indicated.
By: HANNAH BEECH
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7028071, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-13 21:40:08
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