An Illustrator in Her Twenties Has Painted More Than 100 of Hong Kong's Old Shops — and Found the City's Warmth

Painting is only a medium. What she really wants to record are the people.

Hong Kong has plenty of grocery stores, but few go back as far as Chu Wing Kee, which has been open for nearly 60 years. It sits on Possession Street in Sheung Wan, the city's oldest street, where British troops landed and began Hong Kong's history as a colony.

Chu Wing Kee is not easy to find. You have to pass a row of dried-seafood shops and climb a slope before the storefront appears, stacked with goods like a warehouse. Inside, the old-style grocery holds everyday objects from the last century — rare survivors in a life now run by technology.

The shop passed from father to son, and the present owner is the second generation. He says traditional goods have a value nothing can replace: soup simmered in a clay pot smells far richer than soup made in a stainless-steel one. They are not the same thing at all.

Merchandise hangs from every surface, and a good deal of it spills onto the street. The jumble looks random, but look closely and there is a logic to it: cleaning supplies come first, near the entrance, then hardware tools, then kitchenware and the bigger household goods further in. Old objects fill every corner — bamboo water pipes, rattan baskets — like a treasure sack of the past. This is also the only shop in Hong Kong that still sells the red piggy coin banks. The owner says just one old man in the whole city still makes them, and he paints each pig's smiling face by hand.

Chu Wing Kee was the first old shop the Hong Kong illustrator FlyingPig painted. She had been hired to do it, but as she worked she decided she did not want the piece to become commercial. "I didn't want to use old shops to make money out of consumption. I wanted another way to let people get to know them." So she gave the painting to the owner, and from then on painted old shops for their own sake. She scans every painting she makes and gives a copy to the shopkeeper.

Mido Café, another of her subjects, is a far busier place — not only Hong Kong residents but many tourists come to see it. In recent years a good number of traditional cha chaan tengs have closed under fierce competition and steep rent increases. Mido Café opened in 1950 and has stayed open for more than sixty years, making it the oldest surviving cha chaan teng in the city.

Why this shop? FlyingPig's answer is blunt: "Because it was far too hot that day." She went in for the air conditioning and was pulled, without meaning to be, into the shop's stories.

Mido Café has a character of its own in where it stands, how its space is arranged and how every detail is made. It occupies a tong lau — an old walk-up building — on a corner in Yau Ma Tei, right where Temple Street meets Public Square Street. Corner buildings were what FlyingPig painted most often when she first began sketching outdoors: they tend to be more striking, and many of them are old. The day she first walked into Mido Café, she happened to be drawing that very corner tong lau.

Mido Café occupies the first and second floors of the tong lau, and has kept its 1950s design and kitchen equipment ever since. Its best-known dishes are baked pork chop rice and lotus-seed yuenyeung ice. The menu has not changed, the old bing sutt layout is intact, and every brick and tile holds the flavour of old Hong Kong. The building has kept its 1950s face as well: a vintage menu board stands at the front entrance, and the second floor still has the upstairs seating that was common then, where diners could eat and watch the street below.

The giant neon sign on the outside wall, its lettering brightly coloured and its design full of period character, together with the curved windows on the second floor, makes the shop's most recognisable image. Inside, orange-yellow and dark brown set the tone, worked out in careful detail — pale green wooden window frames, mosaic tiles — and walking in gives the illusion that time has run backwards. The café has also served as a location for Hong Kong films and television dramas, among them Goodbye Mr. Cool (《九龙冰室》) and Revolving Doors of Vengeance (《酒店风云》). While painting, FlyingPig learned that the owner had chosen every tile himself; the whole shop carries his taste.

That day of sketching made FlyingPig a friend of the owner. This June she painted a large mural on Mido Café's outside wall. Twenty people worked on it over four days. On her Facebook page she wrote: "Special thanks to the neighbours who walked past and joined in on the spot." The mural tells Mido Café's story too: back when Reclamation Street was still open sea, fishermen would come ashore and go straight to Mido to eat, and some even held their wedding banquets there.

The Shanghai Wah Lai Barber Shop in Choi Hung Estate is the story FlyingPig tells most often.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Shanghai-style barbershops were the mainstream of Hong Kong's hairdressing trade, and to this day the old masters are still the ones holding the scissors; some are past seventy. They applied to come to Hong Kong in the 1980s from Shanghai, or from Zhejiang and Jiangsu, and have worked here ever since on one skill: cutting hair. Now modern salons are everywhere, the traditional trade is dying, almost no young people go in, and only a few old Shanghai barbershops are left in the city.

The Shanghai Wah Lai Barber Shop — "Wah Lai" means splendid, which the shop is not in the least — is one of those survivors. It has been open 55 years, the barbers are still the same few men, and the same faces still come through the door. A few old masters in white uniforms, the old barber chairs: it feels like the 1970s or 80s. Wah Lai was founded by a Shanghai immigrant, Xu Zaizi. When Choi Hung Estate was finished in 1962, nearly every household had four or five children, and business boomed — more than two hundred customers a day, numbered tickets for haircuts, the queue running out the door. In 1984 Xu Zaizi's eldest son came from Shanghai to Hong Kong to take over his father's business. From the 1980s Choi Hung Estate began to age, the children grew up and moved away, and business fell sharply. But those who stayed still came here for their haircuts, and Wah Lai has stayed too.

For FlyingPig, Shanghai barbershops were always a mystery. She had all kinds of imaginings about them, and the old perm rollers, the stickers and the barber chairs inside made her curious. "When I was small and walked past Shanghai barbershops, the windows were always covered with frosted stickers," she says. "I was so curious about what was inside, but I never dared go in." To this Hong Kong girl the old Shanghai masters looked a little fierce, and most Shanghai barbershops served only men, so she never had the chance.

Then one Father's Day she dragged her father in for a haircut. Become a customer first, get friendly later: she not only finished a painting but also gained several friends decades older than herself. The owner, Mr Xu, called her "little girl." A little girl looked out of place in that shop at first, but the girl who came to paint gradually became part of the scenery. After several visits FlyingPig gave the owner two paintings, and painted portraits of the men who work there. "We became friends. We chat often, and we check in on each other at holidays," she says.

These threads between people are what FlyingPig's paintings record and go after. In three or four years she has painted more than a hundred old shops, and it was those paintings that led to her first collection of illustrations, 《老店风情画》 (Portraits of Old Shops). The title sounds steeped in nostalgia, not like the work of a woman in her twenties.

For the book she picked ten old shops. Along with how each shop looks, she wrote up the stories of her dealings with the owners and placed the essays beside the paintings.

FlyingPig once held a portrait exhibition next to a street stall in Yau Ma Tei, called the "Ma Ma Tei Neighbours Portrait Exhibition" — a pun on Yau Ma Tei and "ma ma dei," Cantonese for "so-so." Calling it an exhibition may be putting it too grandly: the hundred-odd portraits simply hung around the stall like curtains. This thoroughly unofficial show was advertised in an equally down-to-earth way. She carried a sign by herself through the streets around Yau Ma Tei, walking from Shanghai Street to Mido Café to Canton Road, calling on the neighbours to come and look.

From the winter of 2015, this street stall in Yau Ma Tei saw FlyingPig turn up from time to time to paint the neighbours: an unfixed hour on weekdays, noon to 2 p.m. at weekends, with her own materials, a small stool and a table. The painting went on for more than a year, and the show opened this April. One hundred and one portraits recorded 101 stories, all of people living nearby. The site itself — a green street stall in Yau Ma Tei — was a product of the street: once a place to do business, later a gathering spot for neighbours, and an important public space for building ties between them.

The stall where the portraits hung was cleared by force a few months ago. The exhibition ended with each neighbour taking their own portrait home.

Like that stall, the old shops in her paintings have been disappearing one by one. Under the pressure of a changing era, many traditional businesses — grocery stores, Chinese medicine shops and the like — have given up and closed, decades of trade gone overnight. More than once she has finished a painting, gone to deliver it to the owner, and found the shop already shut. It is a loss she feels.

Beside a park on Lung Chu Street in Tai Hang Tung, Shek Kip Mei, there was once an ice-cream cart everyone knew. It was a converted push cart, and "Ice Cream Uncle" Wong, a man of nearly a hundred, sold ice cream from it here for more than sixty years, in any weather. Every day he sat in a rattan chair with the ice cream ready and waited for the children from the nearby primary school to finish class. As a young man Uncle Wong was a salesman for an ice-cream company, cycling to Sham Shui Po, Mong Kok and the Lai Yuen amusement park to sell it. He set up in Shek Kip Mei sixty years ago and watched the neighbourhood change.

FlyingPig once painted Uncle Wong beside this park, and the picture went into 《老店风情画》. Besides the sketch of the cart and the man, it records how she met him and what his days were like. But after the book came out, when she went to hand him a copy, she found only the cart at the roadside. Uncle Wong was gone. A park cleaner told her that one day he collapsed while setting up his stall, was taken to hospital, and never came back.

FlyingPig wrote on Facebook: "It was drizzling that day. I just sat quietly in the pavilion in the park. Helping him push the cart felt like something from only a little while ago, and it made me sad, and wistful. While everyone assumed he was still on Lung Chu Street in Shek Kip Mei, the old man had in fact vanished without a sound. He was a landmark of this community. I hope everyone remembers him."

She likes to sketch in watercolour, and because she once worked in film post-production her paintings look much like film storyboards: full of colour and very exact. As she sees it, over these years of sketching outdoors her brush and paper have slowly turned into something else — a relationship between people.

FlyingPig has been a full-time illustrator for only two years, a newcomer by the trade's standards, but in those two years she has made a name for herself in Hong Kong illustration. She held the first exhibition of her life at the Eslite bookstore in Tsim Sha Tsui, under the title "Sketching Under a Blazing Sun: Sunscreen, Sweat and Stories."

She wrote at the opening: "In the spring of 2013 I went out to sketch on the street for the first time. Then I built up the habit of sketching every week, and gradually found I was addicted to drawing the city, fascinated by its old streets and shops. Along with the sketching, I began to get to know the old neighbours living in these communities, to chat and spend time with them and learn their stories. Their stories built our city, and they built me at the same time."

Q = QDaily

F = FlyingPig

Q: Why did you quit your job to become a full-time illustrator?

F: I studied animation at university. After I graduated I worked for four years, doing mall design and film post-production. I had to work overtime every day and I wasn't happy; even at work I was thinking about painting. At weekends I would always go out to sketch, and at the office I would think about where to paint next. I spent my lunch breaks colouring in unfinished pieces, and sometimes I left work early just to paint outdoors. I agonised over it for a long time, because I always felt an illustrator's job isn't very stable. But then people started asking me to draw illustrations for them, and I found that my paintings could carry a message and that I could live off painting. My parents weren't strongly against the idea either, so in the end I simply quit. I'm glad to say I still hand money to my parents for the household.

Q: Why old shops?

F: Because they're beautiful. At first I only painted old streets and buildings — tong lau, rooftops, that sort of thing. Old buildings have more character and personality; they carry the marks of time. Only later did I turn to old shops. Then I found that these shops usually keep traces of history and carry a lot of the past behind them, while new shops often feel cold.

Q: How do you choose which shops to paint?

F: Just curiosity. These days when I walk down the street I look around, and if I see an unusual shopfront I get curious about what's inside, so I go in. It's a fairly casual process. Sometimes I just crouch by the door and paint. Other times I see in the news that some long-running shop is closing, so I go over, look at the place, buy something, and see whether I want to paint it. Then the point of the painting is simply to give it to them as a keepsake. It's all quite casual; there's no fixed way I pick them.

Q: How long does a shop usually take you? Do you finish in one go, or go back many times?

F: There's no set time for a painting. Usually about three hours; the fastest was half an hour, the slowest six. It's flexible. But I like sitting inside for a long time, because that lets me feel the place better and talk more with the people there, and all of it becomes part of your memory of the piece. I care more about the process than the result.

Q: What have you gained most from painting?

F: Courage, and my relationships with people. It has brought me closer to society, listening to a place's stories. Sitting there for hours, talking with the neighbours, I feel I have more of a part in this society. I used to be a little afraid of strangers without knowing what I was afraid of, but then, for the sake of the work, I tried greeting people, and it slowly became a habit; I began to learn how to build trust. I still remember the first time I went to Wing Heung Bing Sutt, the owner chased me out, and it was the other customers who talked him into letting me stay. Honestly, when someone opens their doors to do business, they are not obliged to look after me. Sometimes you meet a warm-hearted owner who buys you food or something like that, and that's them being kind, but not everyone is like that. Getting along with the neighbours taught me respect; often it's worth taking the first step, and worth thinking about things more deeply. And the more people I meet, the wider my outlook and my heart become. As a child, going to Ap Liu Street with my father, I often thought the men there were lecherous and sleazy. Now I watch a person calmly first, instead of deciding in advance — and those men, it turns out, have a strong sense of loyalty.

Q: Your book 《老店风情画》 (Portraits of Old Shops) — did you plan it before you started painting, or did it come together on its own afterwards?

F: At first I never thought about it. I actually started painting these old shops six years ago, but back then I painted alongside a job. It was only when I quit two years ago and gave it my full attention that I realised how much I didn't know. I grew up in Hong Kong, but there were so many places I'd never been, and I went at it almost obsessively. Sometimes it isn't only about recording a place; I also want people to rebuild a sense of belonging to their own neighbourhoods. There is still so much of Hong Kong we haven't discovered.

Cover image: 《老店风情画》 (Portraits of Old Shops)