I don’t remember where I first heard of Tin Shui Wai, but I believe someone told me that this was the famous “walled city” (圍城） that the movie was named after, so I went there expecting something desperate and ghetto, but didn’t find anything of the sort. The subway ride is nice…the stations are not as flashy and busy as the ones in the major Hong Kong lines; there’s a certain sterility, as if somewhere along the way, somewhere underground you passed a threshold. Of course for me, this is just reflected in how things look and appear, and what effects that has on you–that is, how the urban environment, urban form, urban aesthetics affects your perception of, well, everything: even if you are thinking of something utterly different, the environment is still there, leaving some kind of subtle imprint on your mind, coloring your moods and perceptions. I think that’s why my photos has some strange and obviously distorted color schemes: the attempt to impart the deep truth of the place, or one’s subjective vision of a place, means that you hve to depart from the common notion of verisimilitude, and truth be told once you get used to it, it ain’t no thang.

I wondered what it would be like living here; in one sense it’s no different from the rest of Hong Kong, but in another sense, it is separated by those lush forests and hills, and has a radically different form—we’re talking suburbs here, high-rises cloned and sprouted all over the place, jutting awkwardly into the sky, assured of their functionality but somehow unsure of their existence.

Shopping malls: I played Time Crisis 4 there, blowing a chunk of change that could have been used for better purposes. Others played that horse-racing game where plastic horses race across a track. It’s dated and quaint for that very reason. You would have expected horse-racing to have morphed into some high octane video game with crystal-clear graphics, the whole nine yards. And here was this old contraption, looking like some kind of cheap museum diorama…anyhow I can’t see what the fun of it is. Nearby, old men play video game mahjong.

I wonder how much time I’ve spent wandering through malls. It’s become some kind of ritual, so much so that I can pretty much sleepwalk through it. It’s so utterly familiar and so perfectly banal that you don’t even think twice about it, it’s automatic, a twitch that sometimes lasts an entire afternoon.

tinshuiwan, tianshuiwan, pictures, photos, arcades, games, life, malls, shopping, consumerism, consumers, ricoh, photos, photography

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