HONG KONG Culture and commerce have
long been linked. The most obvious example
is a museum’s gift shop, which can reportedly
contribute up to as much as a quarter of its
associated institution’s revenue. Or think of
the many art- and sculpture-rich retail spaces
à la Dover Street Market. It’s surprising, then,
to hear K11 Musea calling itself the ‘world’s
first cultural-retail destination’. If not the
first, K11 is still impressive. The brainchild
of billionaire developer Adrian Cheng – who
assembled 100 (yes, 100) creatives for the
collaboration – the supermall is part of Hong
Kong’s huge new art and design district, Vic-
toria Dockside, on the Tsim Sha Tsui harbour.
Located within the certified green
building is the first Hong Kong boutique for
Guangzhou-based retailer The Fashion Door
(TFD). For the interior, the team at brand-
ing design consultancy Leaping Creative
fleshed out an idea they’d been toying with
for a while, a concept that centres on one of
southern China’s largest recycling facilities.
‘The resources the facility preserves have
always interested us,’ says Leaping Creative’s
founder and design director, Zen Zheng, ‘and
we’d been thinking about doing something
with them. Coincidentally, our client knew the
facility as well, so after some initial concept
brainstorming, one of our main options for
the store was to bring in the recycled materials
from the factory. The concept of recycling
responds to the circle of fashion trends – of
fashion being constantly inspired by elements
from the past.’
Although much of its supply
comes from Guangzhou, the factory collects
materials from various industries in different
cities. The salvaged assortment includes
parts of old public buses and heavy trucks, as
well as leftovers from certain manufacturing
processes: injection-moulding cases, steel
from pressure casting and so on. ‘Everything
strongly refers to China’s tag as “the world’s
factory”,’ says Zheng. ‘We found the old and
new materials very fascinating, since each is a
symbol of industrial civilization and tells the
story of our modern lifestyle.’
With this in mind, the Leaping
Creative team concocted a notional narrative,
gazing a few hundred years ahead through
a fictional crystal ball. When Zheng starts
relating his story, though, it doesn’t feel
altogether sci-fi. He talks of future humans
discovering the site underwater and sifting
through the debris to find a giant ‘creature’ at
the core. This creature would ‘give archaeolo-
gists a glimpse of the excessive consumerismUPCYCLING There’s a lot of confusion surrounding reuse and recycling.
One circulating story is that recycling expends more energy than it saves. The likes
of Brigham Young University Idado are hoping to debunk such myths, reporting that
‘manufacturing using 1 ton of recycled materials uses less than half of the energy to
manufacture the same products using raw, virgin materials’. Reuse, though, is more
transparent. And keeping the original objects intact – casting them in resin to create
new forms, for example – brings the message out into the open.
in 21st-century society’. For now, though, the
sculpture he describes is the first thing visitors
see when approaching the store: an other-
worldly assembly of old escalators, boat and
motorcycle parts and a truck’s engine.
Rising tide levels mean waterside
locations like this one are resting on precari-
ous ground. It’s an issue that will certainly
affect the generation to which K11 Musea
and TFD are aimed. ‘TFD is targeting trendy
young people, so we wanted to be cool and
attractive when conveying the idea of green
and sustainable,’ says Zheng. He says the
store is designed to tell this sustainability story
through the installation, details and ambi-
ence, but is the method of communication
obvious enough to be understood? If nothing
else, the presence of an overbearing alien-
esque form should fulfil another of the store’s
goals: to help initiate a conversation with its
customers. TI
leapingcreative.com112 Spaces