Back in the cut: WEAR HELMET

  • March 30, 2018
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HerpDerp The Diary of Lupin Pooter We'll go much more a roving
To rear emergency exit.

It was a public holiday and so we spent the afternoon back in the cut, crawling through promising-looking industrial buildings in a corner of the New Territories. As connoisseurs of light-industrial decay, we savored the innumerable signs of shoddy construction enhanced by decades of deferred or improperly executed maintenance and the exquisite stratigraphic layering of flaking paint over chipped tile over flaking paint over…

Smoke lobby door sign.
Many of the other stairway doors in this particular door were propped open.
Multiple layers of cement, paint, and smashed-up tile.
Hong Kong’s take on the Rorschach inkblot test? I see a T. rex head in profile. Or maybe the Thundercats logo.
Interesting that certain floors have apparently, over time, seen more traffic. Or at least certain floors have attracted the sort of people who press elevator buttons with the ends of their keys or other scratchy objects.
Many Hong Kong buildings lack floors with floor-numbers ending in 4, because it’s considered unlucky by a certain, highly-prevalent-in-China sort of supersititious nut. But not this building.
Can you believe that some fools claim that Hong Kong is a sort of art desert?
A street artist who’s clearly primed to give Banksy a run for his money has been at work on two of these signs. Thoughtful outsider artist that they are, they’ve left the third unmarred for purposes of comparison.