INTRO
TL; DR
OUTRO
Pink Noise is a macroscopic metaphor, one that points toward more abstract ideas. When I first started working on it, I tried to downplay Hong Kong's presence — because the decline of industrialization and human adaptation ought to be universal themes, not confined to a single city or a single sentiment. But I soon noticed that everyone who flips through the work immediately recognizes it as Hong Kong, and inevitably asks: what do these atypical Hong Kong landscapes imply?
So I gave up on the idea of "de-Hong Kong-ing" the project. Pink Noise, I think, is indeed a project that grew out of Hong Kong. They say names are spells. From the moment it was christened with the brilliantly evocative term "concrete forest“ — and if we take that term seriously, then Hong Kong is always going to be the site of a Democratic Forest, an absolute, post-anthropocentric democracy where everything counts equally.
To talk about human activity in an age when everyone is itching to move might seem to suggest a kind of passive-aggressiveness. But it's quite the opposite — it's an aggressive passiveness: one extreme industrialization collapsing into the next, so dense that a needle couldn't even lie flat within it. Passivity is not a posture; it's the only space left to exist.
The place where I take drum lessons is an industrial building in Kwai Hing wrapped in bamboo scaffolding; on unlucky days you have to transfer into a paint-splattered freight lift whose iron gate you haul up by hand before it will run. I'd rather practice at the drum room in Futian a friend recommended than go to class at all — it sits on top of a wet market (you couldn't even call it a second floor), but there simply isn't that anxiety that comes purely out of a tight space. I've come to call it "Hong Kong Retro Anxiety”[1] — the kind of high-contrast, saturated longing that looks gorgeous and suffocates you at the same time. Like the neon of Yau Tsim Mong, or the ghosts in Lan Kwai Fong at Halloween, it's alluring and dangerous, and on its way past it snuffs out the impulse to ask questions.
It occurred to me once that Hong Kong might be the only place that has lived industrialization as though it were an indigenous way of life. The loss that people mourn here is, in essence, an indigenous loss — inevitable, lingering, as drawn out as the days of the monsoon season. And that melancholy isn't because something particularly precious has been lost, but because it has finally begun to be carried along by time, like every ordinary civilization before it. It is not special — and that very lack of specialness, for those who once were, is itself a loss of agency.
And Pink Noise is something like a bedtime signal broadcast to everybody, telling them there’s nothing to worry about: bamboo goes up over a building and comes back down, a building weathers and a tree withers — "it's all the same.”[2]
[1] Hong Kong retro style is a nostalgic design and fashion movement that reinterprets the city's "golden era" from the 1950s to the 1990s, blending iconic local elements like neon signs, bamboo scaffolding, and cheongsams with contemporary aesthetics. Yet beneath its alluring surface, this style embodies an underlying emotional tension—an anxiety and sense of impermanence rooted in the city's history, reflecting a collective fear of loss and a desire to preserve cultural identity amid relentless change.
[2] "It's all the same" — the last words of Zhang Beihai in Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest (the second book of the Three-Body trilogy). As the natural selection ship is about to be destroyed, he accepts the outcome with quiet equanimity, recognizing that whether he or another survives, the continuity of the human species is what matters.