There is a section of tong choi street called gum yu gai, and it translates to goldfish market. As the name suggests they sell a whole bunch of fish of all kinds, probably even the questionable, exotic and endangered kinds. I’m not completely sure the significance of gold fish in Hong Kong culture, but as I read somewhere, its a symbol of wealth and success. Walking down this street feels like an aquarium plopped into the center of a bustling city, ordered only by its somewhat systematic layers of aquatic tanks, filled with scales coloured in varations of red, orange and gold. a colour pallete of siamese fighting fish are tied up individually into a grid of clear plastic bags, racked up and repeated through various vendors... I wonder what the streets look like from their perspective. Warped up by the plastic bubble, jailed in mid air, hanging, swimming, yet going nowhere. Standing amongst other pedestrians looking at this grid of googly eyed swimmers, somehow reflected in the tanks you’d see the sturdy old apartments scaled up behind. One cant help but make a connection to the fish trapped up in plastic bags, trapped up in our apartments, swirling within our own bubbles. In Hong Kong, 6,659 live people per square kilometer, Layered on top of each other, where famlies, dreams, joys, and sadness coexhist simulatneously. This amout of density, you can almost feel the forces of all these emotions squeezing into you, pushing you up onto your tip toes, holding you by your shoulders carrying you into a current you can yet make sense of.
As I made this odd connection, my eyes adapted to the layer beneath the reflection, mesmerised by the gold fish bobbing, weaving and flowing between each other, in a tank that feels definitely over stuffed, I make eye contact with a gold fish looking through the glass cock eyed, doing the thing they do... blop. bop. blop.