Latest news with #SaiYingPun
South China Morning Post
16 hours ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
How a Hong Kong French bistro is making a ‘macabre' fine-dining dish ‘more approachable'
Pressed duck, or canard à la presse, has historically been a grand culinary spectacle found only in luxury hotels and fine-dining restaurants. Part of the allure of the traditional French dish is its elaborate table-side preparation as the duck's juices, blood and marrow are pressed out and added to a thick, rich sauce that is served with the meat. But many gastronomes have never tried the dish because so few restaurants offer it. A new bistro in Hong Kong's Sai Ying Pun neighbourhood aims to change this by introducing the dish to the masses. Whole roast dry-aged duck at Le Colvert. Photo: Jonathan Wong At Le Colvert, operated by a small French team including restaurant manager Hubert Dubouix and chef Guillaume Sejourne, pressed duck is the signature dish.
South China Morning Post
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Peter Yung's The System, a rediscovered gem of Hong Kong New Wave cinema
From a darkened first-floor shop window, the zoom lens picks up the lean, sallow-faced figure loitering on the opposite pavement. Seemingly invisible to passers-by and shopkeepers, he is a magnet for solitary, middle-aged men who approach in silence, holding HK$10 notes. Advertisement No words are exchanged, but between meetings, he disappears into an open staircase and returns within moments to discreetly hand off small paper packets to more customers who then drift away. This is repeated, again and again, on a daily basis, with the hidden camera capturing every one of the transactions. It's the mid-1970s and Hong Kong is flooded with heroin, home to the highest percentage of addicts in the world. The dealer is Dai So, a street-level Wo Hop To triad selling packets of No 3 heroin from the gang's protected patch on First Street, Sai Ying Pun. He's also an addict, and he knows he is being filmed. His brother, Sai So, keeps a lookout nearby for a rival gang, also selling heroin, a block up, on Second Street. Police officers David Hodson (left) and Ho Shiu-cheong show the press their seizure of heroin in April 1977. Photo: SCMP Archives The team behind the camera are award-winning British filmmaker Adrian Cowell, two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Chris Mengis, and a young local, Peter Yung Wai-chuen, associate producer and camera operator. They would live in that empty shop for five months, filming the street-level drug trade below. They were there making Opium: The White Powder Opera, one in a series of documentaries Cowell wrote and directed on the drug trade over two decades. It was a groundbreaking film as, through his Hong Kong government connections, he received unprecedented access to the secretive Narcotics Bureau as it sought to identify and arrest high-level drug smugglers and break up their syndicates 'I was the organiser for the documentary,' says Yung, now 75, sitting among the greenery of his home on Lantau Island. 'The important thing is, at that time, Caucasians couldn't go on the surveillance, so that's why I came in and became the one to deal with all these Chinese in the gangs.' Advertisement
South China Morning Post
29-04-2025
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Why brands and businesses are embracing street art culture in Hong Kong
Take a stroll around the streets of Hong Kong a couple of decades ago and the amount of street art you'd have seen would be close to zero. A smattering of graffiti, yes, but almost no walls where businesses had commissioned artworks for commercial purposes. Advertisement Today, the situation couldn't be more different. Hong Kong is covered in street art of all descriptions, with hotspots from SoHo and Sheung Wan – including perhaps most Insta-famous of all, artist Alex Croft's Graham Street mural for homeware store GOD – to Sai Ying Pun's ArtLane, to Wong Chuk Hang and large parts of Kowloon, especially Sham Shui Po and Mong Kok's Public Square Street. Essentially, it's everywhere. Street art has its roots in graffiti, an inherently rebellious art form whose practitioners by definition don't ask for permission, making much of it technically illegal. However, it has long been co-opted for commercial purposes; pretty early on, savvy brands realised that it was something they could use to gain instant countercultural cachet, while the hip-hop culture that produced graffiti has always balanced an emphasis on underground authenticity with a keen awareness of commercial possibilities. Street art has its roots in graffiti. Photo: K. Y. Cheng Consequently, today the term 'street art' covers everything from purely creative graffiti to work paid for by large corporations, and its practitioners similarly come from a diversity of backgrounds – from those who started with tags and spray cans, to those who trained at fine art academies and interiors ateliers. For marketers, it's a particularly effective way of standing out from the crowd, given the diminishing effectiveness of many traditional channels. In Hong Kong, the F&B industry has been a particularly enthusiastic adopter. Says Malique Goldin, head of partnerships at Black Sheep Restaurants, which adorns spaces like the wall of its Central Vietnamese bar Chom Chom with murals: 'We are storytellers and there are many ways to tell our stories; it's another canvas to express who we are. It's also a good creative outlet. It can be funky, it can be fun. It doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be us.' Partly brands have embraced street art so enthusiastically because of a cultural shift, with the rise of the star graffiti writer, exemplified by Banksy , legitimising the art form and giving it a kind of mainstream acceptability. It's also very photo-friendly, with social media playing a huge role in its growing popularity, while non-profit organisation HKwalls, which works tirelessly to put artists together with companies that can provide them with a wall to work on, has been pivotal in giving it a kick-start in the city. Cultural shifts have encouraged brands to embrace street art. Photo: Handout 'Since 2016 or 2017, with HKwalls and social media, there have been more people wanting to get into the street art scene,' says artist Kristopher Ho, whose spectacular, hyper-detailed animal illustrations crop up all over the city, including as part of HKwalls. 'It pays better: if I'm going to paint something large, I'm going to get paid more. But just because you know how to paint on a piece of paper, it doesn't mean you know how to paint on walls. The scene is definitely more vibrant now, but it's hard to maintain the quality.'
