Hong Kong Hawker as Makeshift Designer
Street Stalls and Markets around Hong Kong are a breeding ground for a wealth of handmade and altered signage that are the unexpectedly beautiful results of bringing together and re-contextualising items with new, unintended uses to create unique makeshift designs. Most signs are a clear, straightforward assemblage of reused packaging materials and everyday objects, used creatively by the stalls owners to sell their products; while also saving money, space and revealing the ‘non-throwaway’ culture and attitude found within the city — giving a unique insight into how these elements are woven into the fabric of everyday life in Hong Kong. In their creation these functional signs become unique, beautifully designed objects and are a cause for comment on the notion of the everyday person — or humble Hong Kong Street Hawker — as designer.
In a city such as Hong Kong where space — due to a widely lack-there-of — is thought of as valuable, and the hawker trade bringing in an inconsistent amount of income for the stall owners, almost all of these makeshift signs found within stalls are made from a base of packing materials that were previously used by the owners to transport and obtain their produce and products; reducing the build-up of waste, while also saving money through this form of up cycling. These materials are often cut, ripped or shaped into a new form (or even left as is), and then crafted together with everyday objects — broken, old or readily available — such as pegs, clips, skewers, ties, gardening, and other tools, paper and even the odd chopstick or two — creating new, functional objects that are quite aesthetically intriguing in their unique and often haphazard construction, physical appearance and materiality.
Local artist Kacey Wong celebrated this nifty, makeshift nature of the street hawker way of life in his sculpture ‘Transform Bar’, made out of collected scrap materials and housing a unique expansion method; commenting on how the need to fit stalls with such makeshift designs was originally born out of the licensing restrictions placed upon the trade — still an issue being faced today — which saw the need for stalls to be altered to allow for a quick get away in the event of a raid.
While most of these items are put together by the stall owners with little thought to them being special or unique, they become a physical representation of such issues that are faced in Hong Kong, both in the past and present day; making them significant cultural artefacts. This opinion is one upheld by photographer Michael Wolf in his musings about his work ‘Informal Arrangements’, which looks at this culture of the makeshift through the lens of the Hong Kong alleyways; stating that such objects, or designs, “present an authentic slice of Hong Kong’s grass roots culture. In my opinion they [alleyways] should be nominated as a heritage site”.
The creation of these handmade signs also reveals the collective attitude that forms part of the cultural makeup of Hong Kong, which can best be described by the western phrase ’if ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, or ‘if it is, make it something else’, that is often overlooked in Western Cultures with largely consumeristic led, throw-away societies. These deeply ingrained ideologies lead back to a plethora of serious socioeconomic issues faced by the people of Hong Kong during different times of conflict throughout the cities history of changing ruling powers; causing a lack of resources and accessibility to wealth and opportunity, laying the foundations for the emergence of a new form of unacknowledged craft. This need to keep, reuse and repurpose possessions until they were completely unusable became the basis of this now normalised process of creating these makeshift objects that appear everywhere around Hong Kong. What makes these signs interesting is the bringing together of usually completely unrelated items to create something that both looks unique, while at the same time uses these items in an new unintended, functional way. These signs are usually thrown together in a sort period of time, with the main goal of creating something that can easily be written on, and has the ability to either be poked into or stood amongst the produce or products, or hung from any available space in the stall; leading to the birth of often extremely creative, innovative contraptions that form the basis of these signs.
In the likes of Marcel Duchamp’s priceless readymade sculptures that can be found in the protected halls of art galleries around the world, the Street Hawkers of Hong Kong are creating these amazingly overlooked designed objects out of the cheap materials and items they find themselves surrounded with everyday. There’s something to be said here about the current landscape of the ‘design-world’ and what we consider ‘design’; when the largely followed principles of ‘form follows function’ are ever-present in each of these makeshift creations that house a strange beauty in their oddness. Through their conception, the act of physically putting them together, and even the deeper design thinking evident in the consideration behind how the basic functionalities of each of the items they consist of can be used together in new, meaningful ways, these everyday stalls owners are certainly, in the upmost sense, designers — and the makeshift signs they create, designs. Like any design object, these handmade signs become symbols of the cultural landscape of Hong Kong and the niftiness and innovation that make up its fabric. They also serve as artefacts of everyday life, in a trade that is slowly becoming extinct.
Keely is in her fourth year of studying Visual Communications at the Univeristy of Technology, Sydney — with a passion for film, motion design and illustration. After a recent academic trip to Hong Kong, she has rekindled an old-passion for writing, and is also looking to extend academic research into her future career.
Flickr Image Archive: https://flic.kr/s/aHskUZsYUG
