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Temporary
Tenant - Real(ty) Dreams
Hong
Kong, 2004 |
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In Hong Kong one can rent a shop for just a few days.
Before the Mid-Autumn Festival you can buy moon cakes from
a shop that will sell cheap kitchenware the following week.
The shutters might be put up for a few weeks, but then a new
tenant will move in and offer traditional massage, before
his cousin will get hold of a batch of fake Louis Vuitton
bags and take over the lease for a few more days. Almost invariably
the goods for sale come from factories across the border,
and are displayed in cardboard boxes or on shelves left behind
by previous tenants. Fluorescent tubes hang precariously from
the ceiling, where strips of old wallpaper can still be seen.
Hand-written day-glo paper signs fill the remaining space.
Special sale, limited time only. No refunds. Here today, gone
tomorrow.
The hallucinatory character of the Hong Kong cityscape seems
inextricably linked to speed, ‘disappearance is a consequence
of speed’ 1 as Ackbar Abbas noted. The speed
of circulation and valorization of capital. The same logic
that underpins the way the urban space is written, erased,
written over.
On October 12, 2004, I rented a shop for one day in Lee Tung
Street, better known as Wedding Card street, in the Wanchai
district, at the cost of HK$500.
I had nothing to sell.
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open and yet empty shop functioned as an anomaly, a phenomenon
that passers-by couldn’t classify, as it challenged common-sense
notions of capital valorization. The apparent absence of any
utilitarian purpose could only be explained as an act of madness,
a subversion of the unspoken rule of maximization of space for
economic gain.
But what was the blue-wigged woman doing in the window of a
shop on Wedding Card Street?
The next day she disappeared, and the shop started selling shoes.
Was she ever there? Did she leave any traces? Under such conditions
of acceleration and disappearance, the uncanny apparition takes
on the quality of a ghost, a figure always outpacing our awareness
of it.
Why the knowing smile on her face? Who was she waiting for?
Lee Tung Street has been home to the city's wedding invitation
printing shops for a long time, since the colonial government
grouped printing activities together to better keep an eye on
them.
The Urban Renewal Authority, URA, intends to tear it all down
and let developers start over with a commercial and residential
project costing HK$3.58 billion. To speed up the redevelopment,
anyone who applied to the URA as tenants would be given cash
compensation for surrendering the premises.
The temporary tenant knows all about being in the right place
at the right time.
The space of performance becomes one with the performance of
space.
PS. In August 2004, an Assistant Manager of the
URA was charged by the ICAC for bribery and fraud in relation
to such compensation. He is alleged to have disclosed the time
when the URA would conduct a survey of tenants. |
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| Notes |
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| 1 |
Ackbar
Abbas, Hong Kong. Culture and the politics of disappearance,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p.9 |
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