Hong Kong
CNN
–
Above several flights of concrete stairs, the Blue Lotus Gallery is located next to a hipster coffee shop and vintage shop on a narrow tree-lined path in Hong Kong’s artistic Shane Wang district.
It is also surrounded by basketball courts. In the park, the rooftops are well-balanced and invisibly isolated between the skyscrapers. Overall, there are 22 courts in a 600 metre radius (1,968 feet).
It’s strangely not an anomaly in Hong Kong to be so close to so many basketball courts.
American photographer Austin Bell estimates that the city has more outdoor courts than New York and Los Angeles as part of his mission to photograph them all in Hong Kong after washing satellite images. . It is the subject of his exhibition at the gallery, running until February 23rd, his photobook “Shooting Hoops.”
Using his camera and a drone, Bell took over 58,000 photos of 2,549 colorful basketball courts. The coronavirus pandemic has spread the project for three years.
The project was a way to “experience the city” and examine the often unconventional approach to urban design, Bell said. “It’s not really about sports. It’s about Hong Kong’s architecture, colour, surroundings and topography,” he added.
Bell’s appeal to Hong Kong’s basketball courts began in 2017 with his first trip to the city. He visited Colorful Choihang, a rainbow-colored public housing project with multiple basketball courts in front of the tower block. Blue and emerald green. It has become one of the city’s “Instagram Hotspots” and is fascinated by photographers like Bell capturing its facades.
After taking the photos, he didn’t think much about it – he began watching the basketball court in other unusual and colorful places.
“I started mapping them on Google Maps,” Bell said. “I went back to fall 2019 and shot them. Two weeks later, I said I needed to find them all.”
Bell contemplates over satellite images, identifying basketball courts hidden within residential blocks, sitting on mall roofs or multi-storey parking lots, or covered in thick jungles of remote islands, spreads. I tracked my obsessions on the sheet.
When he began the project in earnest, Bell said he had photographed up to 100 courthouses in a few days. Given the density of Hong Kong, the numbers that say “not that crazy” rank fourth at 7,060 people per square kilometre. , according to World Bank 2021 data.
At one point, he challenged him to shoot as many courts as possible in a day, planning a route through many of the city’s most populous residential areas, including Tuen Mun, Tin Shui Wai and Yuen Long.
“I just looked at one diagnostic photo of each court and went to see what I could do,” Bell said. The main limit was the drone battery, and he was hoping for 200 shots, but surprised himself after he went home and counted 475.
Not all courts were that accessible. The day required a day’s trip, like the island of AP Chau, Hong Kong’s smallest residential island settled from Beijing in 1952 by Christian missionaries.
People often miss Bell’s photos. Partly because he visited the court in the early morning or late afternoon to avoid the harsh noon sun, while Bell didn’t want to disturb people in the courtroom.
Over the years, Bell has observed many uses on the basketball court beyond its intended purpose. “I’ve seen choir conventions, people walking their pet turtles, people drying their orange skins, everything you can imagine,” he said. “Its main purpose is basketball and you have a big indication. There are no other ball games, hanging ground lies, remote control cars, etc., but you’re still looking at everything.”
“It’s always so many different things. I think that’s persuasive. But it’s also the fact that there isn’t that much other (public) space to do things.”
Basketball – a game invented in the United States in 1891 as a safe and entertaining contactless sport by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), a game invented in the United States – has been a permanent favorite in Hong Kong for over a century.
Jeroen van Ameijde, an assistant professor of urban design at China University in Hong Kong, provided essays on topics in Bell’s photobook, speculating that the YMCA arrived in the city in 1901, followed by the construction of the organization. . Time) The state-of-the-art sports facilities are likely to have caused the Hong Kong basketball outbreak.
As the city’s population rapidly expanded in the 1950s and ’60s, recreational spaces were an important consideration for urban planners. This was later codified in the guidelines for the new public housing project, which stipulates the need for one outdoor basketball court for every 10,000 residents. This is a higher proportion than other outdoor sports facilities.
“It’s much smaller than the pitch on soccer (soccer). It’s relatively easy to maintain and sometimes it can be used for double use,” Van Ameide told CNN in a phone interview.
Although it is common to incorporate leisure facilities into urban design, Hong Kong’s population-based guidelines are unusual, said Van Amide. Maximizing efficiency is a symptom of high density and rare lands in urban areas. For example, the proximity of recreational facilities to residents aims to make housing projects and districts “self-contained” like a 15-minute city. Within walking distance, Van Ameijde explained.
This culture of space efficiency has evolved in recent years into the “beautification” of some of these leisure spaces, Van Ameide points to the work of interdisciplinary design company One Bite Design. Vivid design.
“Basketball courts, whether they’re between buildings or on the rooftop of a shopping mall, always find a way to puzzle into urban fabrics,” Van Ameide said. “It’s an interesting balance. This kind of overly dense mix of both life and work, commerce and efficiency is very important for Hong Kong’s DNA.”
Hong Kong’s official basketball courts are just a part of the story, accounting for less than a third of the bell. The majority of Bell’s photos are about 1,800 people and are from school basketball courts taken using drones.
Accessibility is one of the biggest differences Bell observed between Hong Kong and New York basketball courts. The latter considers it to have the second-highest outdoor court in the world. Another 1,000.
“Unless you’re in a building that overlooks it, you’ll never know that it’s there,” Bell said of the Hong Kong school basketball court. “So, I think that was part of the appeal too. I wanted to conquer these walls from the air dimensions and get everything hidden behind them.”
Almost all of these images were taken with a drone. After tightening the drone laws in Hong Kong in late 2022, what he adds is impossible.
This is one reason why Bell doesn’t think he will revisit the project in the future, despite continuing to monitor and track the location of the new courthouse. “The numbers have already changed. There are already new ones since I finished this project. New homes (projects) have been built, but there are probably some that have been demolished. The numbers are constantly fluctuating. I will,” he said.
But exhibitions and books don’t just document niche topics. For Bell, his mission to find and take photos of every court was a practice of creating mundane magic.
“We take all these visuals for granted,” he says, “In fact, when you condense them in a photo or when you put them in 2D, it’s really different. I know it’s something.”
