wall to wall

At the beginning of last week, I knew of just four murals in the Tam Mei valley, photos of two of which I included in Fish Out of Water. I wrote about a third in An Odd Coincidence, posted a couple of days ago, and I included this one in Photographic Highlights: 2019–20 (Part 2):

However, I discovered a fifth, the ‘fish out of water’ mural, on Monday. And I was back in the area on Wednesday to show Paula what I’d discovered, although I also wanted to check out a detour that I’d spotted on Google Maps that led to the Yiu Shing Mo Temple.

The temple was a disappointment—it is little more than a village shrine—even though it is signposted from some distance away, but on our way back to the main road through the valley, our route took us past another mural. It is extremely crude, appearing to have been painted by children, but I thought that it was worth recording nevertheless:

This photo was taken looking along our direction of travel, and I’ve included it partly because the route past the mural is marked on Google Maps as a road! Regular readers will already be aware that I have a poor opinion of the accuracy of these maps, which frequently identify footpaths and alleyways as roads. Does it look like a road?

These photos provide more detail of the various sections:

As you can see, this is yet another mural with a farming theme.

We were back in the area on Saturday, not specifically to explore any further, because I didn’t think there was much else to discover. Unbelievably, however, we found two more murals, both of which I will have cycled past last winter after I devised a new start to the loop around the valley but which are located on a short section that was omitted on both Monday and Wednesday.

The only reason I spotted this mural, which is located a short distance from the road next to a minibus terminus, is that we stopped for a water break:

I particularly like the notion that it was painted by a cat! I can’t explain the significance of the railway lines, although I suspect that they may be a reference to Hong Kong’s connection to China’s high-speed rail network, which I believe runs through a tunnel underneath this area. This mural, like that shown in the first photo above, includes the names of the artists responsible.

The mural is on the side wall of what appears to have once been a gatehouse, although this implies that there were once walls or other defensive structures here, and there is no longer any trace of them:

We cycled past the second mural without noticing it, because the road is narrow, and there was a minibus coming towards us, but after photographing the gatehouse, I noticed that there was a path leading away from the road, which of course I wanted to check out. It led to a road that I’d explored on Monday (another dead end), but we followed it backwards and looped around to pass the mural again. And this time I did see it:

This is the only overtly political mural that I’ve found in the valley. The rampaging monsters at the top are wearing bow-ties, which is a clear reference to former Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang, who was never seen in public without one (this image was painted when he was still in office, and presumably he would have been the one to approve the high-speed rail link). And the fish being squeezed by a woman’s hand is regurgitating a high-speed train. As far as I’m aware, this rail link has never been popular in Hong Kong, and I take this painting, which is on the wall of an abandoned tin shack and is not likely to survive for long, to be a protest.

I don’t expect to find any more wall art in the Tam Mei valley, but I do enjoy being proved wrong in situations like this, and I will certainly continue to look.