PUBLIC MARKS with search kong

At 6,426 people per km2, Hong Kong boasts the most densely populated urban center in the world

Exploring the ephemeral past of Chinese entertainment from Hong Kong, the U.S.A., and around the world: vaudeville pioneers, flappers, aviatrices, burlesque dancers, hula hoopers, movie queens, sex bombs, jade girls, tomboys, pin-ups, sour beauties, girl jocks, swordswomen, and go-go girls.

There is nowhere else in the world quite like Chungking Mansions, a dilapidated seventeen-story commercial and residential structure in the heart of Hong Kong’s tourist district. A remarkably motley group of people call the building home; Pakistani phone stall operators, Chinese guesthouse workers, Nepalese heroin addicts, Indonesian sex workers, and traders and asylum seekers from all over Asia and Africa live and work there—even backpacking tourists rent rooms. In short, it is possibly the most globalized spot on the planet.

In use, the camera was stealthy and virtually silent which was great for street photography.

streets of hong kong

Big news from Twentieth Century Fox International this morning, announcing that they will cease to provide 35mm prints of their films for Hong Kong and Macau cinemas commencing 1 January 2012. After that date, all Fox content will be provided through DCI-compliant digital formats only. 

When film director Mamoru Oshii was looking for a model of the city of the future for his seminal 1995 animated film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (based on the manga by Masamune Shirow), he turned to the cityscape of Hong Kong for his inspiration.

Hong Kong is home to more than 7 million people. Amongst the high rise apartments, product designer Michael Leung founder of HK Honey, has created his own space bringing nature back into the metropolis one box at a time.

Hong Kong 68, a short video by Impactist gives us a quick trip into Hong Kong during 1968.

Self-built, informal settlements on the roofs of high-rise buildings are an integral part of Hong Kong’s urban landscape. The rise of rooftop communities is closely linked to the migration history from Chinese Mainland to Hong Kong. With each of China’s tumultuous political movements in the 20th century, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, there was a corresponding wave of Mainland Chinese migrating to Hong Kong.

In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon, was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence. The area was a diplomatic black hole, the model of an anarchist society somehow allowed to grow organically without the aid of any government, existing somewhere outside of both British Hong Kong and China.

The buildings of "Hak Nam" folded into one other in a dense configuration of labyrinthine corridors and seedy brown shacks stacked up 10, 12 and 14 stories high. It was a solid building, 200 x 100 meters, a pulsating anomaly, one of the most densely populated places in the world at the time of its destruction. It was called "the world’s first flexible megastructure, the closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self determining modern city that has ever been built," "an environment as richly varied and as sensual as anything in the heart of the tropical forest."

During his more than 14 years in Hong Kong, German-born photographer Michael Wolf‘s perspective on his adopted city has boiled down to an essence of density – the hemmed-in, closely built environment which shapes everything from its peoples‘ lifestyles to their outlooks and even dreams. In Hong Kong Inside Outside, Wolf collects the works of his two previous collections – Architecture of Density and 100x100 – into a two-volume set focusing on the visual elements of one of the world’s most crowded cities.