OGGI HO FATTO

one of my courses here at HKBU is 'Hong Kong Crafts'. and the professor known as Momo wants to show us the real, disappearing ancient crafts of Hong Kong.. so we went on a field trip, around the area of Yau Ma Tei. this is quite an old area by Hong Kong standards, and you can tell because there are still quite a lot of low-rise buildings .

We started at this tea-house. it is one of the last of its kind. inside, it was all built in beautiful wood panelling. and it was full of Hong Kong men and women on the older side.. hanging out at 10 am having some dim sum and tea. delicious. dim sum means basically many small dishes, most of them steamed. including tripe, pork blood pudding, and other delicious delicacies... all much tastier and finer than the dim sum i've had around in the past month.

you can see from the last photo that it got quite messy at the end.

after the dim sum brunch we went to Shanghai Street, the main street of Yau Ma Tei. specifically we went to the shanghai street Artspace which is a small independent studio dedicated to keeping the ancient crafts alive. such as the craft of building flowerboards, which are these celebratory boards built on a framework of bamboo and decorated with intricately made flowers and text, used to celebrate anything from a birth to a new company opening or whatever. The shanghai street artspace is now offering residency to one of the last remaning flowerboard artists, a certain Mr Wong, who you can see in the above photos. his studio got taken away from him so the artspace is now letting him practice his craft in their space, and show it off to students like me. we are going to be making flowerboards like this in our course.

taoism is everywhere. little shrines like the one above are on every street corner, and nobody steps or spits on them. this shrine was in the shop of another traditional artisan: this one made objects in copper.

the next stop was a shop that sold traditional stuff for weddings.. and i fell in love with these huge adhesive, which people usually put on their windows when there's a wedding celebration coming up. they come from the ancient chinese art of PAPERCUTTING ... i should try that!