The book you are holding contains secrets and stories about Hong Kong that have never before been published. Prepare to have your preconceived notions of this bustling Asian financial hub butchered as you journey through crevices, enter hidden portals, clamber over barbed-wire fences, evade security guards and infiltrate derelict structures to travel back in time. Your hosts are an anonymous grassroots squad of explorers who will show you a side of Hong Kong only a specialist minority know about. Although the city has some of the most expensive property on the planet, an unknown world awaits beyond the shimmering skyscrapers and under the glitzy malls. This is the hidden kingdom of non-spaces: environments and structures that lie fallow, usually abandoned and left to rot, or suspended in limbo awaiting evictions and demolition. The HK Urbex crew - a covert collective of urban explorers whose exploits merge archaeology, ethnography, historiography and anthropology - unearth dead zones on the periphery of the city. They invite you to explore haunted schools, rummage through old crime scenes, reconnoitre condemned buildings and uncover the scraps of modernisation which won't be recorded in history books. So come inside, confront the aesthetic of loss, discover the value of dead architecture and see Hong Kong as you've never seen it before.
HK Urbex (Hong Kong Urban Exploration) is an anonymous, grassroots collective that seeks to unearth and document hidden sites in and around Hong Kong. Beyond the shimmering skyscrapers and glitzy malls, the intrepid explorers reveal another side of Hong Kong and the Asian cities they visit, bringing undisclosed non-spaces to light. They are a motley crew of photographers, filmmakers, journalists, writers and adrenalin junkies.
Where many people see only squalor and grime, HK Urbex sees a trove of stories. Elaine Yau, South China Morning Post HK Urbex force us to come face to face with this debris of modernization and these ruins that are constantly accumulating, even as we keep building. Lee Kah Wee, assistant professor of architecture, National University of Singapore The explorers belong to HK Urbex, a so-called urban exploration collective whose expeditions often require trespassing or walks through dark, abandoned or dangerous sites. But unlike some urban explorers, they do not court danger purely for its own sake. Their primary goal is to peel back layers of history sometimes literally, by digging through dust and trash and forge a video archive of Hong Kongs colonial-era environment. Mike Ives, The New York Times To some, a deserted public housing block or a derelict hospital is nothing but a waste of space. But to the explorers behind anonymous collective HK Urbex, these forgotten buildings reveal another side of Hong Kong. Kate Springer, BBC correspondent
