Visual Arts

Blue Lotus Gallery are proud to present ‘City of Darkness’ the first exhibition with the gallery showcasing the now cult photographic work of Greg Girard and Ian Lambot on the Walled City of Kowloon taken over 30 years ago. Overflowing in the intensity of random human effort and activity, vice and sloth and industry, yet exempted from external authority, the city’s beating heart made up of about 40,000 residents, with all its internal arteries and alleyways damp, dirty and lacking in natural sunlight. The rooftop of this strange microcosm of humanity was covered in abandoned television sets, broken furniture, worn-out clothes, and bedspring. Amongst the rubble, village life continued, washing was strung up between television aerials, small children played under the eyes of elderly women and every 10 minutes another jumbo jet descended on Kai Tak Airport skimming so low passengers could see inside the windows of the Walled City. This unique Cantonese squatter colony possessed all the essential attributes of a town: homes, schools, shops and workplaces; temple, shrine and church; medical and dental clinics and pharmacies; facilities for relaxation, cultural diversion, sexual titillation and release not to mention the opportunity purchase hard drugs, as well as to rescue yourself from addiction once you had repented.

In the years since 1994 demolition, the Walled City has attained a kind of punk immortality and a visual aesthetic showing a modernist dystopia mixing filth, darkness, and haphazard concrete construction and overcrowding into a single disgusting yet irresistible brew that is often used in movies, video games or described in books to evoke what only this place managed to organically create. Ian Lambot and Greg Girard set about photographing the Walled City due to a deep fascination and because “for all its horrible shortcomings, its builders and residents succeeded in creating what modern architects, with all their resources of money and expertise, have failed to: the city as ‘organic megastructure’, not set rigidly for a lifetime but continually responsive to the changing requirements of its users, fulfilling every need from water supply to religion, yet providing also the warmth and intimacy of a single huge household …”

The photographs and the memories of the people who lived there keep this place alive in our minds, in all its glory and ill repute. ‘City of Darkness’ will be showcasing prints, books and other memorabilia related to the Walled City. Both artists will be present to give a talk about their experience and to take interviews.