Kowloon Walled City brought back to life on Instagram using AI, in artworks that move beyond its lawless reputation

Kowloon Walled City was a densely populated maze of tightly packed buildings in Hong Kong with a reputation for lawlessness, and even of danger for the unwary

Immortalised in video games and the setting for a recent hit film, it has inspired Hong Kong artist Bianca Tse to reimagine it using AI on her Instagram account

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Breathing Space, one of a series of AI-generated images by Hong Kong artist Bianca Tse based on Kowloon Walled City, was inspired by photographs by Greg Girard of the former enclave in urban Hong Kong. Photo: AI-generated image/Bianca Tse

Mabel Lui

Published: 7:45am, 2 Jun 2024Updated: 2:31pm, 7 Jun 2024

Corrected [8:39am, 2 Jun, 2024]

[8:39am, 2 Jun, 2024]
The captions on an earlier version of the story were incomplete. Rooftop Children is partly inspired by a historical photo of a low-flying plane above Kowloon City. Dentist City is inspired by a Joe Cognigni photograph. Untaken Photo is based on a description given by Greg Girard of a photo he wished he had taken in Kowloon Walled City. The title of Home Memories was misspelled. Overpopulation is not inspired by a Greg Girard photograph.

A city of darkness; an anarchic enclave; a settlement rampant with drug dens, gambling parlours and brothels – these were common descriptions of Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong.

Once considered the most densely populated place in the world, its tightly packed buildings were constructed on the former site of an imperial Chinese military fort, which refugees from the Chinese civil war adopted as a place to live following World War II.

Before long it grew into a miniature city, full of activity – some of it criminal. Among its residents were unlicensed dentists, metalworkers, food stall operators and missionaries.

The Chinese government and British colonial administration in Hong Kong announced in 1987 that Kowloon Walled City would be demolished, and after the eviction of its residents, including a few holdouts who were forcibly removed, demolition began in 1993.

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Kowloon Walled City: tales from Hong Kong’s ‘City of Darkness’

Today its buildings and history live on not just in books, the archives of newspapers including the Post, and graphic re-creations but in pop culture, having served as the source of inspiration for video games such as Stray and, most recently, the widely acclaimed martial arts film Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.

Kowloon Walled City has always intrigued art director and digital creator Bianca Tse Wai-shan, which is why she launched an Instagram account called @walledcity_wildest_dreams filled with imaginative, AI-generated images that bring the enclave back to life.