How a Hong Kong neon artist is making new waves in a sunset industry
A bright spark in a dimming world, Jive Lau – the artist behind Kowloneon – is preaching the gospel of neon lights to a new generation
Released in 2022, the film A Light Never Goes Out follows a family’s efforts to grapple with the legacy of a Hong Kong neon-sign-maker after his death. In the final scene, a long, archival shot depicts Nathan Road in Kowloon during the 1980s heyday of the former British colony, a profusion of glowing neon signs advertising everything from camera stores and seafood restaurants to bars and nightclubs.
It’s a far, lamentable cry from Nathan Road now, which retains little to distinguish itself from a thoroughfare of any other Asian city. Flashing comparatively tepid whorls of LCD if anything, the road shows little evidence of what was once one of Hong Kong’s most recognisable personality traits. Today, a mere 500 neon signs buzz throughout the city, down from as many as 120,000 in 2011.
“I normally try to stay away from news of neon signs being dismantled, but I ended up watching [the whole process] happen all in one sitting,” Jive Lau Ho-fai recalls of the film’s wrenching 103 minutes. To call the 41-year-old neon-sign artisan an optimist would be an understatement. With his mop of fluorescent-dyed hair and weathered leather jacket, Lau cuts an unmistakable figure in a sunset industry, where only a handful of grey-haired veterans soldier on with the craft.
Lau is the founder of Kowloneon, a neon studio he established in 2021 to bring innovation to a discipline that has been battered in recent decades by rising labour costs and rents, tightening government regulations, the loss of talent and the influx of cheap LED alternatives.
