A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design
Ping Pong Vol. 4 marks the Hong Kong publication’s continuing shift away from comics to the world of illustration. Titled Field Guide Collection, this latest volume finds its artists cataloguing various objects, behaviors and techniques through their drawings. As with the previous issue, the collective…
Continue readingPing Pong 4: cataloguing explorations through illustration
City of Darkness (九龍城寨) chronicles the fall and rise of prominent gangster and martial artist 陳洛軍 (“Lok”) as he goes into hiding in the Kowloon Walled City after a bitter fight with his former boss. Set in a picturesque rendition of 1980s Hong Kong, City of Darkness pays homage to what co-creator Andy Seto calls the most beautiful…
Continue readingCity of Darkness: A macho Hong Kong comic exemplar set in the Kowloon Walled City
The second Melon festival about “science fiction, innovation and the future” took place in Hong Kong on March 17 and was markedly more packed, slick and diverse than its predecessor. Festival organizers added a third set of speakers – scientists – to their roster this year on top of the previously-featured science fiction authors and…
Continue readingMelon Festival Year 2: emphasizing the science in science fiction
Last Sunday heralded the third Original Indie Comic Con in HK (第三屆原創誌交流展). Hosted on the eighth floor of a co-working space in an industrial part of Kwun Tong, Hong Kong, the one-day convention was small but bustling, and showed off an often-overlooked side of Hong Kong, where the comics scene has long been derided as being in…
A motley crew of publishers, booksellers, NGOs and education companies descended in Hong Kong this year for the 2017 Book Fair. This odd mixture is nothing new (as we noted in 2015 and 2016), and if anything this year’s fair was a more muted affair with fewer dazzling displays, only one large-sized English-language booth, and a rather…
The inaugural Melon science fiction conference took place on April 19-20 in Hong Kong. A modest, two-day event, it brought together writers, producers, lawyers and entrepreneurs who work in science fiction and its adjacent industries. One of the main draws of the conference was its mix of speakers from both Greater China and the West, a rare get together in…
Continue readingThe Melon sci-fi conference: a stimulating clash of worlds
It was nearing the end of May. With less than two months to go before the Hong Kong Book Fair 2016, Ah To’s book still hadn’t yet hit the presses. In fact, it was looking like the book might not be published at all. Talks had broken down between the author-illustrator and his unnamed, major Hong Kong publisher. Despite a promising start,…
It was business as usual at this year’s ACG (Animation-Comic-Game) Con in Hong Kong. Big international videogame and toy brands dominated, and attendees diligently lined up to shop for Japanese manga merch, to play test games in VR, or to marvel at finely-crafted toy figurines from Japan or the US. This 90% off gacha booth was, for example, swamped…
The Hong Kong Book Fair 2016 continues the city’s longstanding tradition of hosting consumer-obsessed, discount-supermarket-style book fairs. As with previous years, it was mobbed with students towing suitcases to buy in bulk, 20%+ discounts all around, and bookstore-publishers cross-selling each other’s books (but promoting their own most prominently). The books themselves include both fiction and non-fiction, with a large selection of titles…
Ping Pong #03 is all about the printed, physical object, and the results are stunning. Eschewing the convention of a single, bound book, Ping Pong #03 comes as a lushly-packaged set of seven booklets, written and illustrated by seven different artists. While every booklet looks visually distinct, they all bear the mark of the risograph printing process: bright,…
Continue readingPing Pong #03: a visually-stunning package of risograph comics