Art spaces are alien territory for Kwong Yam-chun, but this Shek Kip Mei complex is different - it's where she ran her tiny plastic flower business some 30 years ago. 'This used to be our workshop,' the sprightly 76-year-old says as she walks into a design showroom.
Pointing down a corridor of the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre - a nine-storey former factory building which housed workshops making clocks, furniture and paper handicrafts - Kwong recalls how it served as a gathering place for the community. Workers would play mahjong there during breaks while their children did homework on makeshift tables to the drone of industrial equipment.
When the last workshops moved out in 2001, the tenants took most of the machinery, leaving only the obsolete and outdated items including some imported German printing presses and improvised contraptions. However, the centre's development unit has restored 18 of the machines, now placed throughout the building as part of a permanent exhibition entitled Made in Shek Kip Mei, which pays tribute to the district's industrial past. The oldest item on display is a barrel-like device that experts reckon was made in the 1950s to polish mahjong tiles.
Kwong and her son, Horace Au Cheong, were among the former tenants invited to attend exhibition's opening earlier this month.
Stopping at a familiar hole-punching machine, she says: 'I was very nervous every time I used it. It was so heavy and sharp I was worried that my fingers would get chopped off.'
Exhibition organisers Harriet Cheng Wai-yam and Phoebe Yim Sui-fong wanted a display that could enrich the public's visits to the centre by connecting them to the history of the building. Putting together the information for an accompanying catalogue, however, required painstaking research.
