The tour began early morning with a sound-walk in Kwun Tong, a district located on the eastern side of the Kowloon Peninsula. Weaving through busy intersections, wet markets, tiny alleyways, and abandoned buildings, Young brought our attention to various overlooked places. Each of us were given portable audio devices, which streamed his work Urban Palimpsest (2009), a soundtrack of the city sounds recorded from this exact route, but compiled from different days and time. What I found most compelling about this work was the ambiguity between the live and recorded sounds of the surroundings.

Previously a salt pond, Kwun Tong now houses low-income residential blocks and is considered one of the main industrial areas in Hong Kong. But even this urban landscape is changing. Drawn to Kwun Tong’s larger spaces and lower rent, more people are moving in, propelling the gentrification of this area. From this perspective, Urban Palimpsest can be seen as an audio memoir of a transforming neighborhood. 

The second location was Tsim Bei Tsui, Frontier Closed Area, the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. Public access to certain sections of this in-between land was recently made available and will continue to open up in phases. We walked along the fence, up to a patrol station while listening to Liquid Borders 1 (Tsim Bei Tsui & Sha Tau Kok) (2012), a composition of stacked sound recordings of the environment. 

We concluded our city walkabout with sites resonating more personally with the artist: Queen’s Pier in front of City Hall and the Lotus Pond at the University of Hong Kong. Both places mark significant points in Young’s career, with the demolition of Queen’s Pier bringing him back to Hong Kong from New York in 2009 and the Lotus Pond representing his classical training as a composer, a style he has now moved away from.

At the Lotus Pond, the group read, reflected, and discussed, ending the day having had a more conscious experience with the city’s soundscape.