On a Friday night at Soho House Hong Kong, the 30th-floor Pool Room was at capacity. A DJ churned out West Coast hip-hop classics for a crowd of creative multihyphenates thronging the bar and squeezed onto the narrow balcony. It was just one of the parties and openings accompanying Art Basel, back in full force for the first time since 2019 and bringing with it something not seen here in a while: international visitors.
For three years, Hong Kong was hermetically sealed from the world while being roiled by both the pandemic and political protests. When I arrived in March, two months after the city's reopening—and 12 years after my last visit—the change that most jumped out at me lay across Victoria Harbor from Hong Kong Island and Soho House. It was the rise of the Kowloon area—both on the skyline and in the culture. Once, visitors like me would head straight to Hong Kong Island, working through its dim sum parlors and markets by day and carousing by night. Now, though, Kowloon “is where everyone comes,” my driver said as we sped past Harbour City, the district's luxury-shopping hub, which rivals the main island's prestigious Causeway Bay.
One factor in this shift has been Rosewood Hong Kong, a towering presence on Kowloon Peninsula, which opened in 2019 as the luxury brand's flagship and an anchor for the new arts district Victoria Dockside. But just a year later, its rooms were hosting frontline workers while its kitchen prepared meals for nearby hospitals. When restrictions eased, it quickly became a sanctuary for restless locals who booked staycations as the city waited to welcome the world back in. My week in Hong Kong felt like a turning point. “Art Basel just energized Hong Kong's reopening,” said Radha Arora, Rosewood Hotels & Resorts' president. Every one of the hotel's nine dining establishments was packed. I just barely managed to swing a table at Chaat, its Michelin-starred Indian restaurant.
If Victoria Dockside is Kowloon's new social hub, the area's new cultural epicenter is West Kowloon Cultural District, two miles away. This ambitious 100-acre waterfront development is anchored by a pair of enormous arts institutions that opened during the pandemic: the Hong Kong Palace Museum and M+. The latter, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is Hong Kong's answer to London's Tate Modern, dominating Kowloon's skyline with its giant LED façade. When I visited, an extensive Yayoi Kusama retrospective competed for my attention with stunning views of Victoria Harbor. Facing M+ is the WKCDA Tower, home to the massive new Asia headquarters of the auction house Phillips.
No matter how much Hong Kong has transformed, though, it still derives its dynamism from its singular street-level personality. One overcast day, I went for a walkabout with Lotus Leung, Rosewood Hong Kong's cultural ambassador. We started at Kowloon's Chungking Mansions, a maze of Asian trade with narrow paths and drooping cables. We headed directly to a dai pai dong—one of the no-frills outdoor food stalls that have finally reopened—joining other diners on plastic stools awaiting steaming plates of Hainanese chicken rice and beef balls. In Kowloon City's Little Thailand, a unique element of Hong Kong's cultural fabric threatened by development, we braved a drizzle to eat fish balls on the street and eventually ducked into a cha chaan teng, a traditional diner, for fried bread doused in sweetened condensed milk.
That night, I watched as the skyline erupted in a light show. For nearly 20 years, this 8 p.m. tradition has illuminated Hong Kong for the benefit of tourists. The city felt alive again, but it also seemed to me that, in the course of redefining its relationship with mainland China and the rest of the world, it had grown a new skin. I thought of a comment by a young taxi driver earlier in the evening. “Hong Kong has changed,” he'd told me, “but you can't keep looking back.”
Ask a Local: Where to go in Hong Kong
As the director of the M+ museum, Suhanya Raffel leads Hong Kong’s most important cultural institution—and the centerpiece of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a celebrated arts destination with world-class performance spaces and galleries. “There is no museum in Asia that collects and showcases visual art, design and architecture, and moving images together. Importantly, we are giving voice to Asian art and culture from an Asian perspective,” says Raffel. Unveiled in 2021, the dazzling contemporary-art institution is now ready to woo art lovers with everything from its landmark architecture that lights up the city's skyline to its collection of modern Chinese works—not to mention its waterfront with heady views across Victoria Harbor. “As Hong Kong’s public and private investment in cultural infrastructure bears fruit, the city will continue to evolve as an art capital,”says Raffel.
Raffel's picks:
"The Hong Kong Palace Museum is a leading cultural institution committed to the study and appreciation of Chinese art and culture, and presents the finest objects from the Palace
Museum and other important cultural institutions around the world.
The Xiqu Centre is a performance art venue in the West Kowloon Cultural District that aims to preserve, promote, and develop the art of Chinese traditional theatre and to nurture the local form of Cantonese opera. The institution hopes to advance the legacies of Chinese traditional theatre and support artists in creating new works, to help nurture a new generation of local artists.
Lastly, Wonderland is a year-round, large-scale outdoor performance and event space in the District and a popular space for pop music concerts. This space brings together local and international performing arts partners, whilst offering local emerging artists an affordable performance venue."
For Shivang Jhunjhnuwala who co-founded the hip Young Soy Gallery as an “art world outsider” during the summer of 2020, the pandemic's isolation, while challenging, offered respite from having to look outward for inspiration—and fueled a desire to shake things up. So him and his partner turned their attention to radical emerging artists within Hong Kong, with a view to inject freshness into the art world: “Before, at Hong Kong's art fairs, one would be swimming in a sea of big-name international artists and galleries. The pandemic forced us to look inward and I am excited to see how this will influence our city, especially considering the art we are exposed to has the power to shape our cultural dialogue as a city."
Jhunjhnuwala's picks:
“The Rainbow seafood restaurant in Lamma Island is touristy, but also so fun. Even my friends and I who all grew up here love to go at least once a month. Rainbow even has a free ferry service.
The next thing I would recommend are the horse races on a Wednesday night at the Happy Valley Racecourse. This is horse racing like you have never seen before in your life.
Lastly, I would recommend checking out Tai Kwun that used to be a prison, and is now a heritage and arts center filled with galleries, shops, restaurants, and a museum about Hong Kong in a different era.”
As the founder of Sunset Survivors (and the author of a book by the same name), which offers walking tours to draw attention to Hong Kong's fast-disappearing tradespeople, Lindsay Varty's work is predicated on a bustling, traveler-friendly Hong Kong. The pandemic's restrictions meant hitting pause on her passion for helping people find greater appreciation for its past. “I always say that you only protect what you love, and you only love what you understand, so if I can help more people understand local culture, then hopefully more people will find their own ways to protect its heritage,” she explains. While some of the Sunset Survivors featured in her book and on her tours continued to provide their services through the pandemic—the pawnshop broker extending money to those in need or the traditional Chinese herbal medicinist who saw an increase in local customers who wanted to keep Covid symptoms at bay—others struggled. “With no weddings allowed, the qipao tailor completely ran out of business,” she says. Varty's tours have now resumed, as have her favorite parts of the city, like the market stalls that Hong Kong is famous for and the casual outdoor eateries that she grew up with. “There is lots to be happy about,” she says.
Varty's picks:
"Check out Sai Kung old town, then take a traditional sampan (a traditional wooden boat) to one of the outlying islands for a seafood meal.
Take the MTR to Yau Ma Tei and check out the Tin Hau temple, Jade Market, Temple Street Night Market and walk along Shanghai street to see all the different kitchenware and traditional shops down the alleyways.
Go for a dim sum lunch and try everything! You never know what delights you might find and love."
This article appeared in the July/August 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
