eat, drink, men, women 飲食男女: this and that

Friday, December 28, 2012

this and that - hong kong 2012, part 1

Sorry for the rather lame title. For the first time I am just at a lost of an appropriate title for this post. This is a collection of things that caught my eyes. Some bordering on design and commercial art.

in the city where any half decent apartments cost a million usd and up there are surprising few purveyors of good quality furniture. posh is one of the few i encountered. it mostly sells herman miller office furniture - few, if any herman miller for the home pieces to be found

wood cell phone cases

a collection of vintage cell phones in the display case

animals made from discarded material on display inside a subway station

There is not much fine art going on in Hong Kong. One studio I aware that deserves mention is shanghai street studios

i read about these hello kitty trams recently introduced to promote taiwan's eva airline so i set out to capture a few photos of my own. i had been on the look out the whole week and finally one day i ran into one in sheung wan. in the precious moment my canon 7d dslr started to act up. i managed to squeezed in one shot in among many failed shots. dire situation calls for desperate measure. i compromised and took a few with my jail-broke 3gs iphone that i brought with me for use with local sim cards.

eva airline's hello kitty web page excerpt

i would later devices a workaround by taping off the lens contacts. this results in a complete manual controls of the lens with the aperture stuck in a wide open or completely close position (depends the position it is in at the time of communication failure). needless to say it severely limited the latitude of the camera. i would subsquently found out the problem is very common failure amongst canon lens.

the time square in causway bay usually have very good christmas installation. they have a different theme each year and this year's is lego

unfortunately the installation is the smallest i have seen and the design is most uninspiring

in the city of world most expensive real estate i cannot help but to notice the wide spread use of knockoff good design products. even in a very fancy vw dealer showroom all the furniture pieces are knockoffs. so too are many bank lobbies.

a pair of artemide tolomeo wall lamps in my hotel room - it would pass most but the discriminating eyes

missing labels inside the lamp shade

the poor tolerances of the moving parts and the run-of-the-mill cable strain relief is a dead giveaway

the real mccoy

in a number of neighborhoods you can find a concentration of plumbing supply shops; most sell abundance of modern fixtures from no-name brands that mimic the top end western brands

surprisingly the prices are typically very inflated; you can find few high end shops that sells the premium brands near causeway bay

of course the majority of these products are made in china

this fixture awfully resembles the one sold at ikea - also for a princely ransom

floor covering store - most stone tiles in there are man made; i actually like a lot of the tiles there

crossing the harbor to causeway bay there is a street you would find the high end habitat supplers cater to the top 1%; there are many interior design firms

every self-respecting bath fixture supply store would have a toto washing toilet - this one for $42,800 hkd; in these shops you would find the me-too overprices products amongst the premium western (by that I also include the Japanese) brands