When change comes to Hong Kong it can be swift and ruthless. The fate of the city’s neon signs is a case in point. After concerns over abandoned and unsafe shop signs led to stringent new building regulations in 2010, the vast majority of Hong Kong’s once-abundant neon signs have been removed. Streets once bathed in sultry hues now sulk in the dark.
But sometimes it takes the shock of sudden change to understand why certain things should be cherished. The vast amount of land reclaimed for the Airport Core Programme led to a public outcry that culminated in legal restrictions on new reclamation in Victoria Harbour. The demolition of the Central Star Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier in the mid-2000s sparked a movement to conserve not just old temples and early colonial landmarks but also places of popular significance like Wing Lee Street. When classic 1960s-era bing sutt and cha chaan teng started to close, people like Tiffany Yeung made an effort to save some part of them.
And so it goes with neon. When the Buildings Department enacted a new Signboard Control System in December 2010, with the goal of removing signs that did not conform to new rules, there were an estimated 120,000 signboards in Hong Kong, a sizable percentage of them neon. Within a decade, there were fewer than 500 neon signs left. The more signs that vanished, the more attention people paid to neon. Architects, curators and cultural activists rallied to save signs slated for removal. Photographers who documented Hong Kong’s neon in its heyday, like Greg Girard, saw a surge of renewed interest in their work. Countless articles have been published in local and international media, lamenting the disappearance of neon in Hong Kong.
But what exactly made Hong Kong’s neon so special in the first place? Other cities were once renowned for their abundance of neon signs: Vancouver, Las Vegas, New York and Madrid are just a few. But no other cities were as thoroughly saturated in neon as Hong Kong – and none had the unique graphic identity that emerged from Hong Kong’s collision of cultures.
All of this becomes clear in Brian Sze-hang Kwok’s 2023 book Fading Neon Lights. Kwok is an associate professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design, where he has spent the past decade researching — and collecting — everything related to Hong Kong’s neon signs. Fading Neon Lights is just one of the books he has published on the subject, but it’s the most comprehensive in terms of contextualising Hong Kong neon and the elements that have made it so remarkable.
Fading Neon Lights opens with a potted global history of neon. Neon gas was discovered in 1898 by two British scientists and it was harnessed for practical use by French chemist Georges Claude, who mixed neon and other gases in an electrified glass tube to create a particularly stable and long-lasting source of light. In 1910, Claude publicly exhibited a 39-foot neon installation in Paris; two years later, he sold his first neon sign to a Paris hair salon. Neon soon filled the French capital — even the entrance to the renowned Opéra Garnier glowed in neon red and blue — and Claude hatched plans to expand his business overseas.
Neon gradually became popular for shop signs and advertising in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai. Hong Kong’s first neon sign appeared in 1929, but it wasn’t until after World War II that they became truly common here. The city’s postwar economic boom and a surge of migration from mainland China led to the growth of local neon workshops that could quickly and affordably produce signs for shops, restaurants and nightclubs that wanted to distinguish themselves in Hong Kong’s thriving but hyper-competitive economy. By 1975, about 80,000 neon signs were glowing in the densely-packed streets of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.
Kwok outlines what made these signs so distinct. Intriguingly, many of them had Art Deco elements, decades after the style fell out of favour in Europe and North America. He attributes this to the enduring impact of Shanghai’s Art Deco-infused Haipai (hoi2 paai3 海派, “Shanghai school”) style, a fusion of Western and Chinese influences that spread to Hong Kong with waves of Shanghainese migration after 1949. (Before the Communist victory, Shanghai had been the epicentre of neon culture in China.) This Art Deco styling was accompanied by traditional Chinese calligraphy, often accompanied by words in English and Japanese, the latter reflecting the growing presence of Japanese companies, business travellers and expats in Hong Kong from the 1960s to the 1980s.
As in other cities, many signs were mounted on rooftops, façades or extended from the building as a vertical column. But few other places had as many horizontal signs as Hong Kong: enormous banners that reached far into the street, the better to compete for attention in a city whose density of shops mirrored its density of population. The proliferation of this type of signage in the 1970s and 80s was a testament to lax building regulations — such signage would have been prohibited in Taiwan and Japan, for example — but also the jam-packed nature of Hong Kong’s cityscape. It was these canopies of horizontal neon signs that set Hong Kong apart and provided inspiration for films like Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1995).
Fading Neon Lights catalogues many common elements in Hong Kong neon signs: illustrated renditions of animals, like the renowned Sammy’s Kitchen cow; objects like Blue Girl beer cans; sexy girls in the signs for Tsim Sha Tsui and Wan Chai nightclubs. The latter is a testament to the way neon signs reflect the character of their respective neighbourhoods, something Kwok documents in his book; more than just advertisements for businesses, they narrate the urban experience. Which is one of the many reasons the disappearance of neon signs is such a tragedy. Without them, Hong Kong feels rootless and disorienting. As the signs disappear, so does a sense of place.
Fading Neon Lights is published by City University of Hong Kong Press.