another surprise: update

The week before last, I posted an account of a mural in the network of alleyways that I’ve designated ‘the outer limits: path #2’. In that account, I suggested that the mural was ‘unfinished’, and a few days later, while cycling along this path, we encountered the artist responsible, who was busy adding to his work. We didn’t stop, because we didn’t want to disturb or distract the artist, but we passed this way again two days ago, and we stopped to see what had changed.

This is a general view of the mural, as seen from the direction we approach it:

The section featuring two youths riding broomsticks has definitely been added to. The right-hand figure was incomplete when we last stopped here, and both have been given clothes and admittedly crude facial features:

There is also a crude representation of a village house behind the right-hand figure’s broomstick. Actually, it has just occurred to me that they are not riding broomsticks. They are in fact riding personal rocket sticks, and what I’d taken to be the brush ends of broomsticks are actually representations of rocket exhausts!

In my earlier photographs, there was a stylized rock formation on the right of the Simpsons segment of the mural, similar to that on the left, but it has now been replaced by a tree trunk:

There doesn’t seem to be any kind of overall theme to the various segments of the mural. This is the section immediately to the right of the rocket riders:

The left-hand section is an incongruous abstract design of coloured triangles, but the central section is a lifelike portrait of a civet, a species of wild cat that has become increasingly rare in Hong Kong in recent decades. I suspect that the outline picture of flowers on the right will be coloured in, and if that does turn out to be the case, I shall post a photograph in due course. I also wonder whether the rocket riders segment is complete. What, for example, is the significance of the black geometric shapes? I hope to find out the next time we come this way.