Indelible City, Louisa Lim’s homage to those who love Hong Kong, gives plenty of cause for pause
- Raised in Hong Kong, journalist Lim was in the city researching graffiti artist Tsang Tsou-choi when anti-government protests broke out in June 2019
- She has woven his life, the events of that summer which saw Lim paint protest banners, and the 1980s Sino-British negotiations into a book about the city
For years, journalist Louisa Lim wanted to write a book about Tsang Tsou-choi, better known as the King of Kowloon. He’d spent decades painting his semi-literate graffiti – what Lim calls his “wonky, shonky calligraphy” – around Hong Kong, including on postboxes and lamp posts. He’d claimed that Kowloon was his ancestral property, illegally seized by the British and then, after the handover, by China.
Initially, Tsang was considered a vandal with mental health problems; he’d spent 18 months in Castle Peak psychiatric hospital and later lived in a flat so fetid that sensitive visitors vomited. By the time he died in 2007, however, his work had appeared at the Venice Biennale and in Sotheby’s salesrooms, and he’d been cast in the role of valued eccentric.
In 2011, a Taikoo Place exhibition was titled “Memories of King Kowloon [sic]”. That, Lim says, “was when the inkling was planted in my mind”.
