On a recent cool, damp, overcast afternoon in Hong Kong, a modest crowd of artists, collectors and curious browsers filled a gallery for the opening of “The Flowers of Evil,” an exhibition of fine art photography in an industrial district outside the city center.
Visitors emerged from a dusty freight elevator, slipped into a large concrete room and murmured observations between sips of champagne. Vanessa Franklin, the co-founder of the gallery, Boogie Woogie Photography, lit up with a smile. “If it was sunny, everyone would be at the beach,” she said.
Getting to a beach would have been easier.
Unless visitors are familiar with her gallery, finding it on the eighth floor in one of the decaying industrial buildings in Hong Kong’s Wong Chuk Hang district may be a challenge. But Franklin and other gallery owners have been drawn to the area for its edgy vibe — a labyrinth of old warehouses and a smattering of new high rises reminiscent of East London or Manhattan’s meatpacking district.
In recent years, Wong Chuk Hang has become a magnet for galleries, some brand-new, some decamping from other parts of the city. They have been lured by the lower rents and larger spaces as compared with Hong Kong’s pricey Central district — the heart of the territory’s business and financial community, and home to major international galleries, including David Zwirner, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace and White Cube.
There is a long history of artists setting up studios in Hong Kong’s old factory buildings, ever since manufacturers started vacating the buildings and moving their facilities to mainland China in the 1980s, said Enid Tsui, a journalist and the author of a new book, “Art in Hong Kong: Portrait of a City in Flux.” “Affordable studio space is hard to find in Hong Kong, and these grimy, unprepossessing industrial buildings cost less to rent and have plenty of room,” Tsui said.
“Traditionally in Hong Kong, art galleries were in Central — where the money is,” Tsui said. That changed, she explained, when a fresh breed of businesses tapped into the city’s fast-growing contemporary art market in the early 2010s.
The initial batch of galleries relocating to Wong Chuk Hang were led by experienced dealers with international expertise, Tsui said, citing Rossi & Rossi and Pékin Fine Arts as prime examples. They turned their backs on Central for “an area that was seen as an industrial wasteland.” Some other galleries followed, she said, because their artists embraced the “cutting-edge galleries.”
By almost any big-city measure, Wong Chuk Hang is hardly remote. It is some 20 minutes by car or subway from Central, but the neighborhood is tucked away in an area that for many residents feels like a separate time zone — hilltops and mountain peaks separate it from the heavily populated areas of Central and northern Hong Kong Island.
“Wong Chuk Hang has always been a place where people pass through and not stop,” said Mark Chung, 34, a Hong Kong-based installation artist, who grew up not far from the district. He is one of many local artists whose work has been presented by the district’s top galleries.
In recent years, however, Wong Chuk Hang has become more accessible and built up, with a new shopping mall and residential building and, crucially, a new subway line connecting to the rest of the city.
Pascal de Sarthe, the owner of galleries in Hong Kong and Scottsdale, Ariz. (where his son lives), moved his gallery, De Sarthe, to Wong Chuk Hang from Central in 2017. “I never regretted it,” he said. “There is a sense of community here.”
“Wong Chuk Hang is like the 1960s in New York,” he said. The artists at that time “really created an American identity,” he added, “and the same thing is happening here.”
Among those creating a local identity is Mak Ying Tung, 35, a Hong Kong conceptual artist who goes by the name Mak2. She became one of the city’s most successful artists after her works were presented at the De Sarthe gallery in a show that opened November 2019.
Since then, more than 200 pieces from her “Home Sweet Home” series, artworks on paper and canvas, have been sold by the gallery, and her latest work will be shown at De Sarthe’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong this month. “From the first time I met Pascal, he treated me like an artist,” Mak said.
On that overcast afternoon when Boogie Woogie Photography opened “The Flowers of Evil,” it was not the only gallery in the district open. In fact, it was among more than a dozen galleries in Wong Chuk Hang (including De Sarthe) that had opened their doors that day for a monthly event called South Side Saturday, which encourages collectors and art lovers to journey to the district to gallery-hop and view new exhibitions in one afternoon.
“South Side Saturday was really created for a sense of community,” said Fabio Rossi, owner of Rossi & Rossi, who opened his first gallery in Wong Chuk Hang in 2011. Previously, Rossi had a gallery in London, which he closed in 2022.
Rossi said that getting into Wong Chuk Hang early had allowed him to be part of the growth by sharing with the art community. “Hong Kong has a very collegial atmosphere,” Rossi said, while London was “less so because of the sheer number of galleries, which are more dispersed.”
The unpolished character of Wong Chuk Hang has also attracted new collectors.
“I barely engage with the big galleries,” said Yuri van der Leest, who works for an executive advisory firm and said that he visited the galleries in Wang Chuk Hang as often as once a week. “It’s so vibrant,” he said, “and there’s so much passion.”
He said he had about 160 artworks, with some three-quarters of those by Hong Kong artists, including Mak2.
Jennifer Yu, a lawyer who began collecting Asian contemporary art about a decade ago — Mak2’s work is in her collection, too — said that galleries in Wong Chuk Hang were “more open” to new and young collectors, such as herself. “It’s a bit more inclusive” than the city’s major galleries, she said.
Yu, whose interest in art grew while accompanying her mother to auctions, said that some of the larger galleries could be intimidating for new collectors. “The younger generation wants to understand art when collecting,” she added, “and not just treat it as an asset.”
Mak, who said that her career really took off after her 2019 solo show at De Sarthe, reflected recently on her commercial and critical successes.
“There was a long period of time when I couldn’t make a living as an artist,” she said. “It’s almost like I hit the jackpot.”
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