When Max Yvetot moved to Hong Kong from France in 2025, he began exploring the city in a way that felt most natural to him: with his sketchbook. “I’m an urban planner by profession,” he explains. “And it’s been about 15 years that I’ve been painting on the side.”
Yvetot found himself with quite a bit of free time after arriving, so he wandered, sketched and painted. “The way the buildings are stacked, the different colours, this slightly tropical architecture with structures that are designed to circulate air, these very geometric balconies — all of this impressed me a lot,” he says. “And it made me want to do watercolours.”
One day, Yvetot was waiting for his children at their school bus stop when another parent noticed him drawing. “I showed him my sketchbook and he liked it,” he recalls. It turned out he worked for Italian stationery brand Moleskine. That’s how, only a handful of months after arriving in Hong Kong, Yvetot ended up with a special collection of Moleskine notebooks on display at the brand’s shop in Tai Kwun.
Customers can choose their favourite among Yvetot’s cheerful watercolour scenes and have it printed on the cover of their notebook of choice. Though they consist largely of colourful geometric forms, each scene is familiar to anyone who knows Hong Kong: the city reduced to its visual essence.
“It’s a new city for me,” says Yvetot. “The fact that I was bringing a fresh perspective to the city — I think a lot of people have got used to the immensity of the buildings and everything that seems incredible when you’re a newcomer.”
This isn’t Yvetot’s first time in the city. He visited when he was a child — “eight or nine years old,” he says — when he accompanied his mother on a work trip. He remembers it being the first time he was allowed to wander alone. “I still have that memory of freedom,” he says. “It left an impression.”
Since then, he’s led a peripatetic life, living, studying and working in Lyon, Strasbourg, Paris, Le Havre, London and Moscow — some of it due to his studies in urban planning, others because his wife, Johanna Bouyé, is a diplomat. “Changing cities so many times made me sensitive to all their differences and their unique characters,” he says. “And it’s what pushed me to start drawing.”
He revels in the novelty of new experiences. He recently spent part of the summer in Paris and found himself sketching — but not in the same style as what he has been doing in Hong Kong. “I went to Montmartre and made touristy kinds of drawings,” he says. “They didn’t look like anything I had ever done. But it gave me pleasure.”
He describes drawing as a kind of meditative experience. “It’s an opportunity to really pay attention, to train your eye,” he says. “Sometimes, I’m not satisfied with the result, but I always have the satisfaction of having spent an hour watching, paying attention to volume, to objects, to the shadows that are moving. You see the details differently.”
Last year, Bouyé took up a new post as France’s consul for education, science and culture for Hong Kong and Macau. The move required Yvetot to leave his job as director general of the urban planning service for Le Havre, a major port city about 200 kilometres from Paris. “I told myself, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to come to Hong Kong, which is such a striking city — especially for me, since my job is to study cities, to see how to work and understand how they’re laid out,” he says.
What he finds most fascinating about Hong Kong isn’t just its verticality. “It’s the juxtapositions and the layers,” he says. “The fact you have a 30-storey building and behind it is a 40-storey building and maybe a 50-storey building behind that, all of it perched on a mountain that plunged into a sea that can be quite agitated, with the islands in the distance that look a bit wild.”
And then there are the colours. “Almost nothing is a neutral white,” says Yvetot. Ordinary concrete buildings are painted in sometimes surprising colours; awnings, balconies, shop signs and other details add even more vibrancy.
Yvetot says he’s interested in making more art related to the way Hong Kong’s intense built environment interacts with its equally intense natural environment. “There’s this jungly, tropical quality that I’d like to bring into my work, and maybe mix the very geometric side of the buildings with the sensuality of the brands that are growing in a very rebellious way in the smallest of spaces,” he says.
That’s something he is experiencing more and more as he explores the northern New Territories as part of his doctoral research on the Northern Metropolis, the vast development scheme that is transforming previously quiet rural communities like Kwu Tung.
“I’m often going to those areas to study, to see how the neighbourhoods are evolving, to see the government’s projects, to understand the history of the project,” says Yvetot. “And I go to the archives, too. It takes a lot of time. So recently, I’ve had to put the watercolours aside.”
But he is looking forward to getting back to the experience of studying a place not to dissect it academically, but simply to draw it.
“It’s a bit like when you go to the movies,” he says. “You go into the cinema and you’re transported to a different environment. You’re somewhere else. Then, when you leave the theatre, you’re in the same place you were before. Two hours have passed, the light has changed a bit and so has the atmosphere in the street. And it’s like you’ve changed, too. That’s that kind of feeling I get when I paint.”