HONG KONG: Bold, Brash and Beautiful

HONG KONG Bold, Brash and Beautiful Stuart Wolfendale

The acronym for the International Finance Centre is ifc. Briefly the third tallest building in the world in 2003, at a numerically auspicious eighty-eight storeys, it stands as an icon on the waterfront.

From the top, views are so far and wide that you can actually see across the intervening ridge of hills to the south side of Hong Kong Island. In it is located the Lane Crawford store which is Hong Kong’s Macey’s or Selfridge’s. Lane Crawford was originally a ship chandler, where one could reputedly buy anything from a pin to an anchor.

It was established in 1850 by Scotsmen Thomas Ash Lane and Ninian Crawford. The model depicted here looks as if she is stooping in search of that missing pin.

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When we get close up to these mega billboards, designed to seduce us into shopping beyond credit card limits, their scale becomes such that they disappear into their own enormities. Two friends chatting in a coffee shop are unaware they are now reduced to the height of a mere shoe, dwarfed by the glowing legs and poignantly melting glance of the Chloe model.

Shanghai Tang is a Hong Kong marketing marvel, which began by inspiring a taste for the oriental art deco concept and evolved into a modern lifestyle vision of Chinese chic.

The chain now has a network of boutiques in Shanghai, New York, Tokyo and much of Europe. Model Liu Wen（劉雯）, born in China’s Hunan Province, pouts demurely in a springsummer Shanghai Tang creation from a four-storey high billboard on the side of the historic Pedder Building, home to their flagship store in the heart of Hong Kong.

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Blow-ups from a world beyond the workplace float temptingly above the reality of young commuters hurrying to the office in their everyday wear. Striding through their busy schedules, these urban warriors fleetingly take in the ethereally relaxed model, Freja, in sky-high Chanel shoes and sparkle, suspended above their workaday pavement. They are putting on a pretty good show with their own carefully considered accessories, as distinctive as Freja’s fantastic outfits. After all, as Coco Chanel once said, “Fashion fades, only style remains the same.” Freja is Danish and known in the fashion world as the ‘rebel queen.’ Her unusual cat-walk stride is her trade mark and she boasts tattoos on her neck and ‘elsewhere’ which say ‘float’ and ‘this too shall pass’.

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Brandishing a broom, the municipal employee looks as if he has been summoned to clean up the scene.

But though the modestly attired real-life couple standing before this larger-than-life billboard is liable to attract more attention than the scantily clad Isabeli Fontana behind them, passers-by would be far too polite to betray their curiosity. And anyway, what’s so special about either the reality or the fantasy? Keeping the city clean, falling in love, saying it with orchids, spreading the news; these are ubiquitous Hong Kong doings, and the corseted models may have to bide their time to achieve any impact, even at those affordable prices.

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Eyes front! Perhaps embarrassed by amusing similarities in headgear, set against otherwise startling differences in dress and demeanour, or maybe simply inured to such indiscretions, two patrolling policemen keep looking straight ahead whilst other pedestrians on Hollywood Road are transfixed by this surreal portrait triptych by Mainland artist Jiang Cong Yi.

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Hoarding, hoarding on the wall – or the bus or the tram or whatever – which is the fairest of us all? The images are seemingly locked in an endless beauty contest, not just for the products they sell but also for the looks with which the models themselves are endowed.

Natalia Vodianova, married to British aristocrat Justin Portman, flashes her best bedroom eyes in a Calvin Klein underwear display while, alongside her, the girl with the Folli Follie jewellery competes in a more restrained manner. Buses and trams are not to be outdone, with Benetton and CK2 perfume sharing road space below and inadvertently accentuating the vastness of the billboards above.

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“Just avert your eyes ladies, and keep on walking,� seems to be the message implicit in the demeanour of this quintet as they deport themselves, in their rainbow of exotically layered silk saris, past the scantily attired dimensions of Kylie Minogue, modelling a little something for H&M. Despite such glaring contrasts, it all comes together in a larger-than-life, organized mayhem of colour and acts as another vivid example of Hong Kong’s diversity.

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A curious optical illusion can arise when the size of the eyes makes the tram at left appear conspicuously closer than the one immediately in front of it. In reality both are travelling on the same tracks and in the same direction, but bearing contrasting messages.

The larger visage advertises a Japanese brand of cosmetic while the lady in the red tank-top promotes a local fitness centre.

A former teen TV star in her native Australia, Kylie Minogue is now forty and married, but that does not deter her from creating a splash on a tram. Outdoor advertising in Hong Kong is not restricted to stationary billboards. Buses and trams set those displays in motion, and it seems that, everywhere you look, everyone is in on the act and gleaning its pickings.

Big spenders have been known to monopolise entire subway stations.

But trams remain particularly popular, because they roll through central Hong Kong at a snail’s pace, affording an affluent potential customer base plenty of time to take in the message at leisure. Could it be that advertising rates for the tramways are potentially higher than those for more rapid modes of public transport?

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The dominant message of their conveyance, that natural spring water is a clear choice, has failed to arouse in these tram passengers the same degree of rapture it has evoked in the smiling model so prominently displayed just behind their similarly undistracted driver.

To the bystanders they pass on their journey, however, the girl’s clearly visible delight in her aquatic discovery is heightened by the breezy cool reds and whites she clutches above her blue hipster jeans, cutting a colourful swathe through Des Voeux Road Central.

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The most audacious of Calvin Klein’s outdoor advertisements in Hong Kong, scaling both north and south façades of the former 30-storey Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Central, was impossible to miss. So much so that it finally pressed the protest button.

Complaints were made to the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority, some asserting that it was wrong to expose children to actor Djimon Hounsou’s generously proportioned and near ‘Full Monty’ display. However, it was deemed inoffensive and stayed put for weeks, eventually coming down only when the building itself was demolished.

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Bold and brash, Hong Kong, with it’s glitzy reach-for-the-sky architecture, is no shrinking violet when it comes to outdoor advertising. Small in size and huge in ambition, chameleon Hong kong has accentuated its superlatives by challenging its rivals to the title of Billboard Capital of the World.

No other major cityscape is quite so dominated by giant promotional displays blazoned with towering emphasis across acres of building façades – or wrapped dramatically around various modes of public transport. In a city where anything not only goes but is taken for granted, advertising on a grand scale is simply part of the rampant and unashamed capitalism that makes the city so special.

Bold, Brash and Beautiful is a lighthearted look at the power of provocative imagery in Hong Kong.

ISBN 978-988-98270-7-6

9 789889 827076