Mong Kok
— — the corner where the neon never quite goes off.
Not only on a wall.
“A few square kilometres of Kowloon that hold one of the densest concentrations of people on earth. Tong lau tenements above gold shops, dried-seafood stalls, and the long pedestrian run of Tung Choi Street that becomes the Ladies' Market each afternoon. Goldfish Street still sells goldfish in clear plastic bags hung from awnings; the Flower Market on Prince Edward Road still smells of cut lilies before sunrise. The neon is thinner than it once was, but the corner of Nathan and Argyle still glows long after midnight. — from the studio
Mong Kok, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mong Kok sits in the southern Kowloon Peninsula within Yau Tsim Mong District, roughly two kilometres north of Victoria Harbour. The name translates as 'busy corner,' and the district routinely registers among the most densely populated urban areas ever measured, with figures above 130,000 residents per square kilometre on some city blocks. Nathan Road runs through its centre as the main spine, crossed by Argyle Street and the elevated Mong Kok East rail station. The area was farmland until the early twentieth century; the post-war wave of refugees from mainland China filled it with the walk-up tong lau tenements that still define the skyline.
Mong Kok runs on its street markets and they run on a calendar. The Tung Choi Street Ladies' Market opens its 100 stalls each afternoon around noon and stays lit past eleven. Goldfish Street, the stretch of Tung Choi north of Bute Street, has sold ornamental fish in hanging bags since the 1970s. The Flower Market on Prince Edward Road peaks the week before Lunar New Year, when peach blossom and narcissus carts spill onto the pavement. Sneaker Street on Fa Yuen has clustered athletic-shoe retailers since the 1980s. The Bird Garden, behind the Flower Market, holds the city's remaining songbird traders.
The neon signage that once made Mong Kok one of the most photographed nightscapes in Asia has thinned considerably since 2010, when the Buildings Department began enforcing safety rules against the projecting steel-frame signs. Hundreds have come down. What remains is enough: the intersection of Nathan and Argyle still carries the long horizontal Chinese-character signs that gave the district its reputation, and the side-street LED replacements echo the older red, white, and green palette. The cumulative glow against low cloud on a humid August night is the colour Reid asked for in this piece — saturated, smudged, lived-in.