Fear and Loading

I almost made it to Hong Kong a few years back. We were traveling through China, and one of the people with us was from there—kept talking about how different it was, how we had to see it. But visa issues and time ate up the plan, and we ended up not going. One of those near-miss regrets you file away.

Years later I found this video by Jas Davis, a photographer and artist. Fear & Loading in Hong Kong—something about it stuck with me. He captures the city in a way that feels honest. The density, the strange architecture, the people moving through it at speed, the light and weight of it all. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would’ve convinced me then, if I’d seen it.

Hong Kong carries this weird gravity now. Handed over from Britain to China in ’97, it’s been this contested space ever since—part of China legally, but not in the way people who live there experience it. You feel that tension everywhere, in the streets, in how people move and communicate. There’s a city aware of itself as contested, resisting in small and large ways.

But Jas Davis’s video isn’t interested in that. It’s just Hong Kong as a place—the visual texture, the movement, the commerce and light and speed of life. And maybe that’s the thing. I missed it because of bad timing and bureaucracy. I see it through his camera instead. It’s not the same as going, but it’s something. It’s enough to understand what I missed.