jockeying for position

In case you are unfamiliar with the geography of the New Territories, Sheung Shui is a town to the north of Fanling. In fact, the two towns are so close together that it is now impossible, with modern developments, to accurately define the boundary between the two, although Sheung Shui police station is indisputably in Fanling.

The main north–south road through this joint conurbation is Jockey Club Road, which is a dual carriageway carrying most of the through traffic. I’ve cycled along the dedicated track that runs alongside this road from time to time, but in ordinary circumstances I would be going well out of my way to walk along it.

However, I’ve been undergoing outpatient treatment at North District Hospital recently, and although I could take a variety of different routes on foot, or even a minibus from my village to Fanling station, then the train to Sheung Shui station, I’ve tended to walk back home via Jockey Club Road. Two days ago, as I looked ahead, it seemed as though I could see some colour on the low concrete wall surrounding a public housing estate:

It hadn’t been there a fortnight earlier when I passed this way.

I didn’t have my camera with me at the time, so I made a point of coming back yesterday to take some photographs. This is what I’ve recorded here:

There are a couple of references here to the name of the estate—Tin Ping Estate—so I assume that the motifs used reflect something about the estate, although with the exception of the yellow and orange hexagons, which almost certainly reflect the use of hexagonal pavers throughout the estate, albeit not in these colours, I have no idea what is being represented here. The presence of the blue fish is particularly puzzling.

My general impression is that all the artwork here has been produced by pupils from a local school, and in any group of children, some will have little or no natural talent. So how do you include such children in the project?

I bet they had fun with that!

The next three photos suggest to me a vision of this high-rise estate as just a village. In fact, the character that I’ve translated here as ‘estate’ actually means ‘village’:

Things to note: (1) The use of primary colours, apart from orange; (2) the networks of orange and yellow hexagons, which also appear in the first images; and (3) more blue fish!

To the right of the last image is an entrance to the estate, and to the right of this gap in the wall is the most intriguing of the artwork here. But first a caption:

I’m not going to provide a detailed translation, but in brief it says that during the winter months, lights come on early, and you can see into people’s houses. And each one tells a different story:

Not all the stories are obvious, so I’ve enlarged the previous photo in three segments to allow you to make your own interpretations:

The final photo describes street snacks that you can buy in the evening, although I don’t think that a mere $1 will buy you curried fish balls on a stick nowadays. I’d like to think that the image just right of centre is not a reference to McDonald’s, although it probably is.

The background colour of all the artwork here is white, but to the right of the last photo, the wall is unpainted concrete grey. This doesn’t mean that work here has finished, and I will keep an eye open for possible developments in the future.