Drawing on the Inside: Kowloon Walled City 1985 by Fiona Hawthorne (Blacksmith Books)
Fiona Hawthorne came to Hong Kong in the 70s when she was six. For the next eight years of her life, she roamed through the city with a freedom that finally alarmed her parents. Exploring Kowloon’s street markets was one thing but drinking San Miguel in Wanchai’s bars and coming home late at night in a taxi wasn’t the sort of adventure they wanted their daughter to have at fourteen. They took their family back to Ireland but it was too late. Fiona had Hong Kong in her blood and at twenty-two, she came back as a young artist.
Now she had the ability to satisfy a longing that had gone denied when she was a free-ranging girl. On childhood visits to her favorite market, the one so close to the Kai Tak airport that jets screamed above the heads of shoppers, almost parting their hair, she had seen a spot nearby that was forbidden territory. Naturally that appealed to Fiona.
The Kowloon Walled City had been a separate entity since the days of the British takeover. Initially left out of the original treaty that claimed Hong Kong, when it was included in the following year, it continued to exist on its own terms, under its own rules. In the 70s, it was flooded with mainland Chinese who spawned an explosion of cheap housing blocks, built without inside plumbing or elevators. Rumors that the place was run by triads and was riddled with crime made it a “no-go” area for the rest of Hong Kong. To Fiona, this community of 60,000, supported by mom and pop industries, was irresistible, “a patchwork of chaos with a strange and compelling beauty.” She was determined to go inside but she needed an introduction that would serve as her passport.
One of her old classmates had a friend who worked with drug addicts within the Walled City, a woman who approved of Fiona’s plan to explore and paint the life and surroundings of this private world. Accompanied by a former addict, Fiona spent three months there, carrying her watercolors, stacks of cheap cardboard that ordinarily formed a base for mahjong tiles, and two heavy cameras for photos and videos. The residents of the Walled City spoke Mandarin, which Fiona hadn’t mastered, but in a mixture of Cantonese and English, she managed to communicate with the people she met. As she sketched and painted, she openly showed her work to her subjects and they encouraged her to continue. She was accepted.
Fiona was immediately frustrated by the “image of notoriety” that stigmatized the Walled City. What she found there was a place filled with hardworking people who spent their days making food, plastic flowers, shoes, clothing, in small dark spaces. She painted the dark, impenetrable wall of buildings that characterized the City, but she also showed the shafts of light that passed through the slivers of space between them and brightened a wealth of color within. Flowers bloomed on caged-in balconies and vegetable gardens flourished in vacant bits of ground.
Her art reveal no traces of menace. Watercolor portraits show faces turned toward her in trust and her quick sketches capture moments of deep tenderness. A young couple gaze at each other, lost in love. A man and woman sit with their infant, pouring all of their attention upon the baby. Within the dark and narrow alleyways between buildings, children play and adults sit together, chatting. Fiona’s drawings, paintings, and photos show a community that’s strikingly similar to ones that still exist in Kowloon, its streets filled with traffic and pedestrians, a forest of signs looming above them; small crowded spaces where workers take a break to eat together, sharing dishes made by a shirtless man who cooks over open flames; false teeth arranged in a macabre shop window display.
When Fiona steps away from this bustling world to show its exterior, it’s a view that can easily bring on a feeling of seasickness. The buildings are jammed together, tilting against each other for support, teetering as if they’re drunk. At night, they take on a comforting look, with hundreds of windows beaming light into the darkness, each one a spot of domestic privacy.
Fiona herself appears only twice. On the book’s unjacketed cover, she shoots a video, youthful, slender, and intent upon what she’s recording. At the end of the book there she is again shrouded in darkness, her face hidden behind her massive camera and her mane of hair blazing in an errant beam of light. Less than ten years afterward, the Walled City was demolished, its space transformed into a city park. “I had no idea that I was recording a place that would someday be gone,” she says, but through her eyes and her art, that community is truthfully and skillfully memorialized.~Janet Brown