Every City Displaces Someone, and Hong Kong's Industrial-Building Artists Don't Know Where to Go Either

"I've almost saved up the down payment / A tiny flat I could just about afford / Or else I'll keep paying cheap rent in an industrial building / And keep traveling, storing up more memories"

Among the more than 200 industrial buildings in Hong Kong's Kwun Tong district there are at least a hundred-odd bands — that is the estimate of Yezai, an independent musician who has made his home in one of them. Wong Chun-kok puts the figure higher: "There could be more than a thousand independent bands here." Wong founded a live house called Hidden Agenda, which Time Out once named Hong Kong's best performance venue and which people in the city call "the Hong Kong Coliseum of the band scene."

After dark the Kwun Tong industrial district is close to empty, but every weekend a crowd of young people in band T-shirts gathers there. Follow them into the freight elevator and you can already hear the music coming down from upstairs.

The Kwun Tong industrial district, in southeastern Kowloon, was once Hong Kong's largest industrial zone. Hong Kong steadied after the turmoil of the late 1950s, and over the next three decades light industry grew fast and became the main pillar of the economy. Family workshops multiplied, but they were poorly run and accidents were frequent. So the government decided to build factory buildings of its own.

The first industrial building was finished in 1957, in Cheung Sha Wan, Kowloon. After that, factory buildings went up in Tsuen Wan in the New Territories, in San Po Kong and Ngau Tau Kok in Kowloon, and elsewhere. At one point the government's factory buildings were fully let, and private industrial buildings followed. Then labor and land costs rose, Western countries imposed trade quotas on Hong Kong, and the mainland opened up its economy in 1979. Hong Kong's production lines moved north, and plenty of industrial buildings were left standing empty.

By one count, Hong Kong now has 1,448 aging industrial buildings. The abandoned factory space is cheap, big and high-ceilinged, but owners cannot convert it to other commercial uses — so they are glad to take anyone willing to sign a lease, even at a low rent.

That was when independent outfits such as bands and dance studios began knocking on the door, and the conditions really were ideal: no noise restrictions in an industrial zone, and freight elevators that might have been designed for hauling instruments.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, industrial buildings briefly became a paradise for young artists short of money — just as My Little Airport sang in 《我在暗中储首期》 ("I've Been Secretly Saving for a Down Payment"): "I've almost saved up the down payment / A tiny flat I could just about afford / Or else I'll keep paying cheap rent in an industrial building / And keep traveling, storing up more memories."

Ma Choi-wo moved into an industrial building in 2002. His dance studio is in Kwai Fong, an industrial district that once held a great many textile factories and, after the 1980s, a great many empty buildings as well.

Ma has danced for years and has moved from place to place. He was a dancer with the City Contemporary Dance Company, then founded the dance company Y-Space with his wife, Mandy. In 1996, with no money, the two of them went out to the New Territories, where some farmers had already given up farming. Ma used their empty houses as a dance studio, an office and a home. In those years the company performed in courtyards and in the fields.

That lasted three years, until he won a grant from the Arts Development Council and rented an office and a studio. A year later the government said it was developing the land and pulled down the house he lived in. So in 2000 he had no home, no studio and no more public funding — harder than the New Territories years had been. "At least in the New Territories we had fields to dance in," Ma said.

That was when he found an empty industrial building, and he has been in one ever since. "The space here is big, and there are no columns," he said.

Yezai has been in this Kwun Tong industrial building for several years now. He started playing in bands in his early twenties, in To Kwa Wan at first; when the lease ran out and the landlord wanted more rent, he moved to Kwun Tong.

The studio he shares with friends is 65 square meters and leaks when it rains. He released two albums, in 2009 and 2014, and sold two or three hundred copies in all. Last year, to put out a third, he ran an online crowdfunding campaign with a target of HK$65,000, and did not raise even a small fraction of it.

He still isn't much good with Weibo, and his Facebook page has just over 500 followers. His last performance was at the Underground Christmas Show last Christmas, held at The Hub, a multi-purpose venue in Wan Chai.

Yezai is an artist on the margins. Musicians like him live in industrial buildings and hold day jobs to pay the bills and subsidize their music, for 10 or 20 years, and even then they struggle to hold a place in this so-called "Kwun Tong industrial-building arts village."

Hidden Agenda is another matter: Kwun Tong's independent music scene owes much of its shape to it. It began as a band rehearsal room in an industrial building, more than 150 square meters for a rent of more than HK$7,000. The room was big enough that the bands figured they might as well build a stage, and by accident it turned into a performance venue. Nine bands played the opening show; after that there were at least two shows a month.

An arts village called Fotanian came about in much the same way. It sits in an area called Fo Tan.

In 2001 a group of fine arts students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong put their studios in Fo Tan — in Wah Luen Industrial Centre, the building farthest from the Fo Tan MTR station and the oldest in the area, a bronze-colored derelict block wedged between plastics factories and processing plants.

Chow Chun Fai was among the first to move into the Fo Tan industrial district, and one of the few artists there who work on their art full time. In recent work he borrows scenes and dialogue from films of the Hong Kong New Wave, remaking classics to show Hong Kong culture. The best known are his Infernal Affairs series and Chungking Express.

What sets Fotanian apart is that its artists hold public open days at regular intervals. Chow said they had counted how the visitor numbers changed over the years: the first four-day open day under the Fotanian name, in December 2003, had 14 participating studios and drew about 600 visits; by January 2013, the Fotanian Open Studios program involved more than a hundred studios and over 300 artists, and drew more than 20,000 visits over six days.

How many such arts organizations sit inside industrial buildings, nobody knows — no agency or organization has ever counted or surveyed the artists living in them. But whole arts ecosystems have taken shape in industrial districts such as Kwun Tong, Kowloon Bay and Fo Tan, and many more artists are scattered through Kwai Fong, Chai Wan and other industrial zones.

For Ma, the studio in an industrial building gave him the final say over his own work. "That freedom matters," he said. "Not being limited by the venue, holding the initiative — that is the foundation for developing art."

But his space is shrinking.

Three years ago, when he moved into his present studio, he spent several hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars on the fit-out. The building had plenty of room, but the conditions were wretched and took a lot of money and effort to put right. "There wasn't even electricity at the time," Ma said. Dance rehearsal needs a special sprung floor; he laid nearly 200 square meters of new flooring, and put in mirrors and sound equipment — heavy spending for a company as small as Y-Space.

In six months the lease on this building runs out, and the landlord is expected to raise the rent again. The HK$20,000 a month he pays now is already more than he can carry, and he wants to move somewhere cheaper, which means the hundreds of thousands he spent on the fit-out will simply vanish. Ma thinks that more and more people moving into empty industrial buildings is one reason rents have gone up — that is the market at work — but that the direct cause is the Revitalization of Industrial Buildings scheme.

The Development Bureau proposed the policy in 2009 and it took effect in April 2010. It lets the owner of an industrial building more than 15 years old convert the whole building to other uses without paying a land premium; an approved building can become offices, flats, serviced apartments and the like. The government's stated aims were to encourage higher-value economic activity, push industrial districts to change and spur industry.

Industrial buildings nobody had wanted suddenly became hot property. Turned into hotels or offices, they promised handsome profits. Big conglomerates moved into the industrial districts and started buying, and industrial-building rents shot up.

Choi Lee Industrial Building, on Chun Yip Street in Kwun Tong, is a five-story block completed in 1963, once a steel-casting works. It is also where Hidden Agenda first opened, until the government introduced the revitalization policy and the landlord gave the club a month to get out. Land Registry records show that a company called EAGLE CROWN HOLDINGS LIMITED bought the ownership of floors one to five for HK$130 million; the space has since been cut into small units and leased out.

Two days before the move, Hidden Agenda put on a "Silenced at Once" concert, with 24 bands playing over two days. A year or so later it had to move again: Ko Leung Industrial Building in Kwun Tong, its new home, was slated for revitalization.

Beginning December 24, 2011, over four days, they held a "Relocation Rescue" concert: 35 local and foreign independent bands, among them My Little Airport, Wong Ching and Yi Sik Lau, said a temporary goodbye to more than 1,200 people. Both the number of bands and the size of the audience were far larger than a year earlier. On the last night before the move, the elevator lobby of Ko Leung Industrial Building was packed solid.

Chow Chun Fai jokes that in recent years the attention has gone less to his art than to his campaigning for the rights of industrial-building artists. "These days reporters don't even ask me about my work anymore," he said.

He gave QDaily a set of figures. From 2001 to 2003, rent at Wah Luen Industrial Centre was HK$3.5 per square foot (about 0.093 square meters) a month, and the sale price HK$160 per square foot. By 2013 the rent was HK$9 per square foot a month and the price HK$3,000 per square foot. Over the decade rent rose 157 percent and the sale price 1,775 percent. The artists who had been working there could not take the rent: some moved out, and those who stayed had to bring in more friends to share the space. The government's revitalization program ended in March last year, with only about a tenth of applications approved, but rents that have shot up were never going to come down again.

Besides rent, industrial-building artists face a second hard problem: the Factories and Industrial Undertakings Ordinance, in force since the 1960s.

Hidden Agenda's closure is bound up with it too. Over eight years the live house moved from one Kwun Tong industrial building to another — Choi Lee, then Ko Leung, then Wing Fu Industrial Building — before crowdfunding HK$500,000 late last year to move into the basement of Hung To Industrial Building.

The government held that Hidden Agenda was breaking the ordinance. Anything that does not produce tangible goods does not count as industry, the ordinance says, and only industrial activity is allowed inside an industrial building. In other words, culture, music, theater and the rest are essentially not industry.

Like Hidden Agenda, Y-Space lives in the gray zone of industrial-building rules. By 2014, when Ma moved into his present studio, cultural circles had taken shape in industrial districts across the city — Kwun Tong, Fo Tan, Ngau Tau Kok — and the press had begun reporting on what was being made inside the buildings. From then on the Lands Department started inspecting them, and that year Y-Space received a letter from the department saying officers would come to look at its unit on a set date.

Ma did not know what to do. A friend told him to bring in some clothes and fabric, get a few people together and pretend the place was a garment factory. He did exactly that.

"It felt like putting on a performance — the officials come, take photographs, go back and write a report," Ma said. "They know perfectly well what goes on inside these buildings. They are only going through the motions." The archery studio across the hall decided to leave the first time the Lands Department came; a few days later it really had packed up and gone. Where, he has no idea.

Ma reckoned he could stage that performance once or twice, but Lands Department officers came seven or eight times in all, and most of the time he kept them outside the Y-Space door. In Hong Kong the government has no right to enter private premises unless both sides agree, or officers produce a search warrant.

Ma has thought about moving out, but the lease still has six months to run and leaving early means a penalty, and HK$20,000 is not a small sum for him. So the studio that was open to the public a few years ago now keeps its door shut all day, and he lets visitors in only once he is sure they are not from the Lands Department.

"I feel like a thief," Ma said with a wry laugh. "We'd like to rent commercial space too, but it's too expensive. Artists are all broke."

In 2010 Hidden Agenda held its first press conference, joining artists worried about the revitalization policy and conservationists worried about urban renewal in Kwun Tong to form the Natural Regeneration Cooperative. They launched a march called "We Are Being Revitalized Alive," with more than 800 artists and musicians taking part — the policy hit not only Kwun Tong but industrial-building tenants in other districts, who faced the same steep rent rises and forced moves. Hidden Agenda's eviction became the occasion that linked communities in different industrial buildings that had never had anything to do with one another, and groups such as the Industrial Building Artists Concern Group came out of it. Chow Chun Fai was active in it.

Several years on, talks with the government have gone little further. The Natural Regeneration Cooperative has asked the government to face the rules that govern industrial buildings: some industrial ordinances, unchanged since 1960, are out of date; "exhibitions" count as "commercial activity" under the ordinance and so are not allowed on "industrial land"; the Lands Department questions whether arts activity in an industrial district is legal at all. The government's answer has been that the rules cross too many departments and would be too hard and too complicated to change.

Chow said: "Hidden Agenda has become a brand people know internationally. That did not come overnight; it took nearly 10 years to build up. There is always a way to wipe it out and start again somewhere else. But we don't think we can let go — there is no second 10 years in which to build it up, to rebuild the international networks and the community networks. These people don't just make music on their own; they really live there, working by day and playing music at night, and they are tied closely to the community. You can't pull them up by the roots and expect them to grow somewhere else."

Chow remembers meeting Carrie Lam, now the fifth chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, who told them that as soon as they found an industrial building that could be converted, the government would give them the green light.

Chow said: "That is the government's logic. They think you can play by the rules too, but in fact it's simply impossible. Just finding a single unit is hard enough."

Cover image from: Wikimedia Commons