How Bianca Tse and Greg Girard Used AI to Reimagine the Kowloon Walled City

Bianca Tse doesn’t remember anything about the Kowloon Walled City from when she was growing up in 1980s Hong Kong. But when she finally learned about it, years after it had been demolished, there was something immediately familiar about the infamous informal settlement. Now, nearly 20 years later, Tse has created an entire world of AI-generated images inspired by the Walled City, including an extraordinary collaboration with renowned Walled City photographer Greg Girard.

“I don’t know why I felt so connected to the Kowloon Walled City but I think it was because of my childhood,” she says. Having grown up in a Fanling squatter village and then a nearby public housing estate, Tse had never had a chance to even glimpse the Walled City. In fact, she had never even heard of it until 1997, when she was 15, and she played Kowloon’s Gate, a newly released Japanese video game based on the Walled City. Spellbound, she began seeking out everything she could find about the Walled City, which led her to City of Darkness by Greg Girard and Ian Lambot. Published in 1993, the year before the Walled City was demolished, its moody photographs capture the extraordinary environment that had emerged as a result of an administrative oddity. 

When Britain leased the New Territories from China in 1898, the lease excluded the area around an old imperial fort on the edge of Kowloon City. That wasn’t an issue until 1949, when the previously open border between Hong Kong and China was sealed shut following the establishment of the People’s Republic. The yamen was left to its own devices, a bizarre no-man’s-land outside of both Chinese and British control. It began attracting refugees from mainland China, who built squatter huts that eventually evolved into an enormous warren of shops, factories and apartments that rose up to 14 storeys in height, with a population of up to 50,000 people squeezed into 2.6 hectares – less than one-fifth the size of Victoria Park.

As she perused City of Darkness, what Tse found most fascinating were the scenes of people doing perfectly ordinary things in a place unlike any other. She was particularly taken by a series of 1989 photos of children playing amidst the forest of TV antennae on the Walled City roof. It reminded her of her own carefree childhood in Fanling, where she shared a one-room shack with her parents, grandmother and younger sister. “I didn’t know we were broke,” she says. “I just ran around and did whatever I wanted. I was happy.”

Tse eventually studied design at the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong and began working in advertising as a creative director. A few years ago, she started playing around with the generative AI platform Midjourney, which uses simple prompts to create text or images, to see how she could incorporate it into her work. “When AI came out, people said, ‘It’s going to replace you,’” says Tse. “But to me it’s just a tool. I wanted to see what I could do with it.”

As an experiment, she prompted Midjourney to create increasingly surreal scenes inspired by City of Darkness, which she then used Photoshop to tweak and refine. She began posting them on Instagram where they received an enthusiastic response. “To locals, it looks familiar but also surreal. And to foreigners it looks like the strangest place on earth,” she says. 

Soon after she started using Midjourney, Tse reached out to Girard to ask for his permission to model her work on his photos. “One thing people hate most about AI is that it doesn’t get consent from the artists it uses to train its models,” she says. “So I asked Greg. And he was very generous.”

“I basically said, ‘Sure, go ahead, knock yourself out,’” says Girard by phone from his home in Vancouver. “I looked at her work and thought it was interesting. In particular, I was just happy that she was doing things the right way. A lot of people don’t.”

With the right prompts, AI is capable of generating hyper-realistic images that can be easily mistaken for the real thing. Social media has already been flooded by AI-generated images, raising alarms about its potential use in disinformation campaigns – something that has already happened in election campaigns around the world. Tse takes the opposite approach. “I’m not trying to fool people,” she says. Instead, she infusies her creations with surreal imagery that somehow makes them more emotionally poignant than if they were faithful recreations of historical scenes. 

In one series of images, components of the Walled City take flight like hot air balloons, an idea that cuts to the heart of what the Walled City really was: the collective sum of countless individual aspirations, right down to the structure of the building itself, which grew bit by bit through piecemeal additions. In another series, Tse riffs off a photo taken by Girard that depicts two people staring out from the roof of the Walled City at the landscape beyond. In her retelling, the Walled City is a gargantuan skyscraper whose residents stare longingly out at the city beyond. 

Tse says at least half of her Walled City work is based on Girard’s photos. The two were in sporadic contact by email after she first reached out to him, but they finally got a chance to meet in person when Girard came to Hong Kong for an event at M+, where he projected his photos during a performance by guitar-and-bass duo Gong Gong Gong. Tse invited Girard to join her to see Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, filmmaker Soi Cheang’s throwback action flick set in the Walled City. They were both shocked at just how much of the film seemed to be based on Girard’s work.

“The movie is like a moving representation of his photos,” says Tse. 

“It was disappointing that we [Ian Lambot and I] weren’t contacted, but most of all that we weren’t acknowledged,” says Girard. “For some reason, the filmmakers deny that the book played any role, but I don’t believe that to be true. In fact on YouTube you used to be able to see some film clips of the making-of of Twilight of the Warriors and my book is open on a table festooned with yellow Post-It notes.”

The movie wasn’t exactly to Girard and Tse’s taste — “It’s a cartoon,” says Girard — but it underlined just how much the public had become fascinated by the Walled City. “Over the years it’s become this kind of touchstone for something true and original about Hong Kong,” says Girard. “A sense of community, of course, but also a sense of ‘us against the world,’ this hard-nosed working class place.”

The photo that got away, a collaboration between Bianca Tse and Greg Girard – Photo courtesy Bianca Tse

Tse kept up her Walled City project, expanding it to include interviews with former residents that she illustrates with AI-generated imagery. When she interviewed Girard, she asked him to name his favourite photo from the Walled City. And his response was surprising: “The one that got away,” he said. He told her about seeing a Cathay Pacific flight attendant, still in her crisp crimson uniform, step out of a taxi and walk into one of the alleys leading inside the Walled City. “I thought, ‘This is fantastic,’” recalls Girard. “I went chasing after this stewardess and lost her in the alleyways. I went back a few days lingering where cars stop off and I never did see her or anybody like her ever again.”
Tse offered to recreate the photo Girard would have taken. She generated more than a thousand images, taking three weeks to edit them, before presenting him with a few options. “He was picky with the details,” says Tse, pointing out that the camera lens he was using at the time would have produced a different looking image. 

“Some were not the view I would have seen, like a front-on view of the stewardess walking towards the camera, when I would have been behind,” says Girard. “But some were very close to how I would have imagined it. And the atmosphere is dead on.”

The results of the collaboration, as well as some of Tse’s other images, were exhibited last November at Blue Lotus Gallery as part of the Kowloon Walled City exhibition Voices of the Walls. It was Tse’s first gallery show. “I was so nervous,” she says. “I was so worried that people are going to hate it. A lot of people have mixed feelings about AI.” 

Girard and Tse did indeed face some online pushback for their collaboration from those who feel like AI undermines the value of photography. But Girard is unfazed: “Photography since its inception has been, you know – is it faithful to reality? What’s the difference between an image and reality? That’s always been part of the debate from the get-go. This is just the latest iteration of that.”

For her part, Tse sees AI as something akin to a pencil. “You can use it to copy or you can use it to create something new,” she says. She dislikes generic AI art created with little effort, with its crowd-pleasing, algorithmically-tuned aesthetic geared to spread virally on social media. (A new word has emerged to describe such thoughtless AI content: slop.) “I spend more time on research than I do on prompts, but prompts are still time consuming,” she says. Even when a platform like Midjourney generates an image close to what Tse envisions, she needs to spend hours tweaking it on Photoshop. 

But it’s worth it for being able to virtually walk the alleys of a place she never had the chance to know. “It keeps the story of the Kowloon Walled City going,” she says. “Because the stories are real, even if the images are not.”