Oil Street: The Art Village That Sparked a Creative Awakening in Hong Kong

Sometimes the toughest times are the most rewarding. In the final years of the 20th century, Hong Kong was still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997. The economy was in stubborn recession. The Hang Seng Index had lost nearly two thirds of its value. In the spring of 1999, the city’s unemployment rate hit an all-time high of 6.3 percent. Faced with a downturn in the property market, the government had suspended all sales of its own property. And that led to one of Hong Kong’s most unexpected — and enduring — creative awakenings. 

One of the sites saved from the chopping block was the Oil Street Government Supplies Depot, a sprawling collection of vacant buildings in North Point, including a large 1950s-era warehouse and the original 1908 club house of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. Space inside the buildings was rented out for just HK$2.50 per square foot, which drew the attention of creative types, who moved into the depot en masse. By the end of 1999, it had become a thriving creative village the likes of which Hong Kong had never seen. But the following year, it was gone, the tenants evicted in preparation for the site’s sale to a property developer, who planned to build a hotel and cruise ship terminal.

It was a brief moment in Hong Kong’s art history. But its impact continues to be felt more than a quarter century later. “There is of course an element of nostalgia in the whole story of Oil Street as it is retold again and again, but its relevance is immense,” Asia Art Archive researcher Michelle Wong said in 2019. “The story of Oil Street is not only about the land issues and injustices that Hong Kong has struggled with continuously, it is also about how artists and citizens have found ways to be together, nurture companionship and creative expressions regardless of the times they are in.”

If you ask the artist Choi Yan-chi about Oil Street, one of the first things she remembers is how vast it seemed. “Oil Street was the very first space in Hong Kong that had the style and atmosphere of a loft,” she says. “People enjoyed going there – their eyes would just open so wide.” 

In 1998, Choi had just returned from five years in Toronto. With the help of a grant from the Arts Development Council, she set up 1a space, a venue for contemporary art. All she needed was an actual space. “We had thought the only space available was in a storefront, which we weren’t too happy with,” she says. A stroll through North Point took her to Oil Street, where she saw a banner advertising cheap space for rent in the government supply depot. “That was amazing in itself, and when we got inside, we were even more excited,” she says.

After 1a space moved into the depot, it quickly became the centre of gravity for Hong Kong’s avant-garde arts and design, attracting artists like Frog King, along with designers, filmmakers and musicians. “It provided a strong community for contemporary arts, which had always been invisible in Hong Kong,” says the artist Leung Chi-wo, who visited Oil Street just before he left for a two-year residency in New York. May Fung, one of the founders of the new media art group Videotage, which had a space in Oil Street, recalls the easy interaction that took place there. “In the evening, when artists had finished working, they’d go into the compound outside and just talk, or visit other studios,” she says. “You could feel the energy.”

Newspaper clippings describe an exuberant atmosphere. “Activities may include an impromptu performance-art piece, a celebrity photo-shoot, a roof-top DJ session or a free painting lesson,” reported the South China Morning Post in 1998. “Every city needs a place like this and Hong Kong has always had a missing link,” Ada Wong, an urban councillor and arts administrator, told the paper. “The spaces for art have always been provided by the Urban Council – cold, stark, institutional venues. There are lots of creative ideas from the new generation but they need space.” 

Somehow, Oil Street’s derelict buildings managed to capture the creative zeitgeist of late-90s Hong Kong. “It was all very organic,” recalls Mathias Woo, co-founder of Zuni Icosahedron, a performing arts organization that ran a 7,000-square-foot gallery, Z+, in Oil Street. Some have suggested that Oil Street’s success came from the site’s unique combination of vast interior space, with fourteen-foot ceilings and no obstructing pillars, with outdoor greenery. Others point to the convenient location next to the Fortress Hill MTR station. Still others suggest that the site’s waterfront location gave it particularly good feng shui. Whatever the case, says Wong Yue-wai, former director of Z+, “We saw the possibilities and worked to build something. I don’t think we’ll ever find an area as perfect as this.”

The art village had a physical impact on Hong Kong art. Art historian Winnie Wong notes that smallness has long been one of the defining elements of the city’s artistic production, “partially due to practical limitations determined by the minuscule spaces in which Hong Kong inhabitants live and work, and the relative lack of space, market, and support for art production and display itself.” But Oil Street offered an opportunity to expand. “That year we received a lot of large-scale artworks for the first time – and it was because of this space,” recalls Ivy Lin, who was curating a biennale for the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1999.

It was too good to last. When government land sales resumed in 1999, Oil Street’s artists were evicted. But their campaign to save the village had won enough attention from the public that the government agreed to house them in an abandoned cattle depot in To Kwa Wan that would become the Cattle Depot Artists’ Village. While their new home was being renovated, half of the artists were relocated to an abattoir in Cheung Sha Wan and the rest to a vacant building at the former Kai Tak Airport. 

But it was too late for Oil Street’s creative spirit. Leung Chi-wo remembers going to the abattoir to work on a video project after he returned from New York. “It was deadly quiet,” he says. “It was quite depressing compared to what I saw on Oil Street.”

The Oil Street Government Supplies Depot remained empty for years after the artists were evicted; the planned hotel development was quashed by the Town Planning Board. “It would have been a major local attraction – an incubator that could have really built a strong identity for Hong Kong as a creative hub,” said Woo in 2010. “Instead, it has been pushed back underground.” 

Back then, a decade after Oil Street, pessimism reigned in the Hong Kong art world. “It’s worse than 10 years ago, much worse,” said Woo at the time. “The problem in Hong Kong is that there’s always lots of people doing creative things, but they don’t have the right platform to express themselves, so it dies down really quick.”

The Oil Street artists and arts groups that survived the relocation process were housed in the Cattle Depot Artists’ Village, a collection of red-brick buildings not far from the old airport. For years, the Cattle Depot was everything that Oil Street was not: sleepy, obscure and beset by a top-down style of management that has stifled spontaneous creativity. The village’s open spaces were long off-limits to artists – no artworks, no plants, no outdoor seating. “You can’t even take photos,” said Choi Yan-chi in 2010. “I took my students there to do outdoor sketches and the security came out to tell us not to do that. It’s bizarre.” 

In hindsight, though, it’s clear that the Oil Street spark had not been completely extinguished. In 2003, two years after the Cattle Depot opened its gates to the public, May Fung was talking about its experience at an arts conference when she was approached by a woman who owned an office and apartment block in Wan Chai. Much to her amazement, she offered to donate the use of her property to artists. The result is the Foo Tak Building, a cluster of artists’ studios and cultural organizations in a nondescript 14-storey building just a few blocks from Times Square. “To me, there are only two concerns for artists – a lack of space and a lack of money,” says Fung. “So I told the landlord to rent space to artists for very little money. That’s the magic.” 

Today, the seeds of Oil Street’s brief creative blossoming can be found scattered all over Hong Kong. Cattle Depot still exists, home to Frog King, 1a Space and Ellen Pau‘s Videotage, among others, and it has managed to shake off some of the bureaucratic baggage that weighed it down in the past. The Asia Art Archive maintains a collection of photos, catalogues and other ephemera produced during Oil Street’s heyday. 

And art has even returned to Oil Street itself. In the early 2010s, after more than a decade of sitting empty, the old depot was finally redeveloped into a luxury housing estate. But the historic Yacht Club property was taken over by the government and converted into the new non-profit Oil Street Art Space, branded Oi!, which opened in 2013 and was expanded in 2022. It is by no means as footloose as the original artists’ village, but with a community focus and a strong roster of shows by talented local artists like Nadim Abbas and Choi Sai-ho, it is a reminder of what can happen when the right people come together at the right time.

A portion of this story was adapted from an article by Christopher DeWolf published in Muse, a now-defunct arts and culture magazine, in 2011.

The photos in this story were taken by David Clarke, a photographer and professor of art history who has documented Hong Kong since 1986. An archive of his photos is available through the Hong Kong in Transition project.