A new exhibition on Wing Lee Street teaches Caroline Chen the true makeup of a community

When the Hong Kong film Echoes of the Rainbow won the Crystal Bear award at the 2010 Berlin Film Festival, droves of tourists flocked to Wing Lee Street – the tiny strip of tenement buildings in Sheung Wan where the film was set – all wanting to see the historic street for themselves. For the past two years the street had been at the heart of a conservation controversy, as the government planned to knock down nine of the 12 tenement buildings to make way for redevelopment. However, the attention the film garnered prompted the government to reconsider and the result was a 180-degree about-face, with the government scrapping the entire redevelopment plan and opting to preserve all 12 buildings instead.

It may sound like a success story, but there’s more to it, says Leung Dont, curator of the Layman Life exhibition. “After the film, many people took their cameras [to Wing Lee Street] to take photographs. They would take their long lens and put them in people’s windows, just invading people’s privacy and only caring about superficially pretty things. But is that all there is to the street?”

Leung answers his own question with the Layman Life exhibition, a two-part show about the residents and community of Wing Lee Street. The first floor of the exhibition is a series of photos and interviews featuring past and current residents. The interviews are direct transcriptions, and as such are intimate and colloquial. However not all of the stories are as saccharine-sweet and nostalgic as one might expect. In one interview, resident Ms Lui talks about her struggles caring for her autistic nephew (who also suffers from ADHD). In another, ex-resident Ms Ho is frank and harsh about the government’s inability to make good on its promises to relocate residents.

Despite the occasional frustrations, the portrait of Wing Lee Street that arises from these conversations is of a charming community where everyone knows their neighbours by name and looks out for each other. Mr and Mrs Yum, former residents of the street, say in their interview, “If a stranger walks down the street, we know instantly, because we know every resident of this street.” This sense of communal bond, now rarely found in Hong Kong, is also echoed by artist Wong Wing-fung, who printed postcards for the exhibition. One postcard pictures a glass of water, accompanied by an anecdote: “I was sitting on the stairs... in a very hot summer afternoon,” writes Wong, “The owner of the print shop around the corner offered me a glass of cold water. It might not be worth anything to many people but truly showed the honorable caring heart of an old street scene.”

Upstairs, the show becomes more abstract. In the middle of the room, Hong Kong artist Candice Keung has suspended a row of glass jars with little clay models of the tenement buildings found on Wing Lee Street inside each jar, completely submerged in clear liquid. The models are adorable and reminiscent of Play-Doh, yet there is something eerie about the still glass jars – it is as if the clay buildings have drowned. “It’s like indie pop,” laughs Leung. “The sweet melody hides the dark lyrics.” He sees Keung’s installation as a commentary on heritage preservation plans that often focus solely on architecture. “They [the clay buildings] are dead – there’s no life – there’s no point in just conserving the architecture without the people living there,” he says.

Besides the exhibition, Leung has also collaborated with the Chinese literary magazine Paper Flower to hold a poetry competition. They have received more than 40 submissions, from students as well as scholars. As a way of celebrating the printing-press traditions of Wing Lee Street, Leung plans to print the top three poems onto T-shirts and give them to the residents of Wing Lee Street. Other submissions will be displayed at the exhibition.

As the media attention on Wing Lee Street fades, the street will, doubtlessly, be forgotten by many. However, the Layman Life exhibition serves as a reminder that there’s more to Wing Lee Street than just tenement buildings, offering an honest exploration of the street’s community life. “This exhibition is very sincere,” says Leung. “We don’t need to lie. We’re just telling things as they are.”

Layman Life runs until Oct 9 at The Conservancy Association Centre for Heritage. For further details, visit www.cache.org.hk.