Night has fallen here in Hong Kong and the city is coming alive, showing one of
its most iconic aspects: the neon lights.
Here in Hong Kong, neon lights makeup a quintessential part of the visual
culture and the aesthetic of the streets here.
During the Golden Age of neon the
diffused glow of this cityscape was enshrined in film, helping to form the
unique Hong Kong cinematic style: dark, dense, chaotic, futuristic, and illuminated
by this soft glow of neon. This style spread beyond Hong Kong, informing the
aesthetics of Japanese comics and anime like Ghost in the Shell, and popular
American blockbusters like Blade Runner.
But even though neon is woven into the cultural fabric of this place these
lights are quickly fading.
So what are neon lights? And what place do they have in Hong Kong's urban
culture today? Let's go visit probably the perfect person answer that question,
the legendary Master Wu who is a neon craftsman here in Hong Kong.
Johnny. Nice to meet you. Thank you for letting us come by.
Once a client sends him a design to work off of,
Master Wu starts by heating up a glass tube so that it's
malleable and then he starts bending it to form his design. Once he has the shape
that he wants, he needs to put gas, neon gas, into this glass tube.
So he vacuums out all the air and uses a series of knobs
and machines to pump in a mixture of gas, mostly neon or
argon. He seals on an electric unit that will feed electrical current into this
tube. Once he plugs this into an electricity source, the gas in the tube
responds and begins to glow different colors depending on what gases he's used.
The Golden Age for neon started around the 1970s.
This meant that neon lights were everywhere.
People were competing for the
best neon lights, the best signs, and the designs got really big and really
sophisticated really fast.
And then things started to change for the worse for neon.
These signs look like they're neon,
they're built in the aesthetic of neon, but they're actually LEDs.
See the difference? That's
a neon. That is an LED.
Way cheaper, way more efficient, way easier to install. And
while LED is easy to mass-produce, making neon signs it's more of a craft. It takes
significant time to master.
But this is also a matter of city policy.
The Hong Kong government started raising safety
concerns with these big neon signs, especially the ones that hung over the
street. They created safety codes and started taking down signs that were in
violation, which were quite a few. In recent years thousands of signs have
been taken down, slowly changing the visual landscape of this city.
Neon lights are slowly moving into the realm of cultural preservation.
The West Kowloon cultural district has started curating neon signs
and documenting the
stories behind them.
And as for Master Wu, even though neon lights are disappearing
he still feels optimistic.