City of darkness: Kowloon Walled City reimagined by artist using AI

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.

Tse never got to visit Kowloon Walled City – it was demolished when she was 12; she became acquainted with it after playing the Japanese adventure video game Kowloon’s Gate, whose setting is inspired by it.

“It was the first video game I had ever touched or played, and the whole world in the game really amused me,” she says.

It reminded her of her childhood in temporary housing in Fanling, in Hong Kong’s New Territories.

“It’s relevant to my childhood, because I’m from a family with nothing,” she says. “I lived in a slum, and I had no toys.

“I remember on Chinese New Year, I was sitting on the floor with my mum and selling toys when everyone was visiting their families. I was selling used metal to the shops for HK$10.”

It was at this time that her interest in art began, since drawing was the cheapest way to entertain herself. “I’d watch cartoons and draw, and I’d go to the library every day, read all the illustration books, and then I just [kept] drawing.”

She studied visual communication at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and entered the advertising industry, but soon became burned out. “It’s a really exhausting industry,” she says.

She left her full-time job and has freelanced for more than 10 years, working on various advertising campaigns and design projects for a range of corporate clients.

But a year ago, Tse had the itch to do something new. “You don’t really have your personality when you work for brands,” she says, explaining that her work always revolves around the client’s needs.

“I really needed an [outlet] for creativity and my passion. When AI came out, everyone was saying, ‘We don’t need designers any more. All the artists will be eliminated.’ I was curious as to what it was, and I [felt] I needed to acquire those skills for my career as well,” Tse says.

So she began exploring the use of artificial intelligence to create visuals, and experimented with using Midjourney, a generative AI program. She posted her first AI- generated images on her Instagram account in April 2023, most of which were inspired by Kowloon Walled City.

One, of a girl lying amid rubbish and fish, is a nod to its notoriously bad sewage system, while another is set in the enclave but is inspired by a childhood memory of waiting for her mother.

“My mum ran a frozen meat shop in the wet market when I was a kid, so one of the posts is about a little girl waiting in the rain in the wet market,” she says.

Many of Tse’s early AI-generated works were inspired by photographer Greg Girard’s images in the book City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City (and the updated City of Darkness: Revisited), which he worked on with writer Ian Lambot.

Referencing Girard’s photographs of children playing on a rooftop in Kowloon Walled City, Tse generated works that show young children on swings overlooking buildings in Kowloon City and playing soccer near the edges of buildings.

She also created a video of cats lying amid heaps of waste, inspired by Girard’s photo of a grocery store owner and his cats, and another video that pays homage to its architecture.

In addition to using existing photographs, graphics and articles as inspiration, Tse conducted interviews which she used as source material for her AI work.

One of her interviews was with Girard, who gave her the task of creating an image that he wished he had taken, while another was with the artist known as Plumber King, a former resident of Kowloon Walled City.

“I wanted to make the page more informative, so people can have some takeaways reading the post,” she says of including more text in her posts in recent months, adding that she did not want to just show a random AI image that was visually interesting.

Aside from visual satisfaction, Tse hopes that her work will allow people to view Kowloon Walled City through a new lens, and set aside its associations with drugs, gambling and prostitution.

“My work is not accurate, of course. It’s imaginative, but it can give a new perspective for people to learn about and experience the history of Hong Kong,” Tse says.

“Before I started this project, I thought: it’s the City of Darkness. It’s a place full of crime, it must have been very frightening to enter, it must have been very dangerous.

“But the more I work on [this], the more I talk to the people who used to live there or who photographed there … the more I want to bring out the good sides of it, because most of the people who lived in the Walled City were actually just normal citizens like you and me – they just didn’t have much money,” she says.

“I want to bring out the resilience, and I think that’s what we share as Hong Kong citizens too.”