Tag Archives: Tai Koo Shing

Forgotten Fine Art: The Cityplaza Copper Suite

In Hong Kong, you can often find pretty things in the strangest places… which often means discovering fine art in the most mundane of anonymous corporate offices.

Such was the case with this stunning series of plaques entitled The Cityplaza Copper Suite by Australian sculptors Joan Walsh Smith and Charles Smith in Tai Koo’s Cityplaza complex of buildings.

I was taken aback by the level of detail in these – you could spend ages poring over these still find even more interesting and clever little vignettes revealing themselves in the copper artwork. The style reminds me a little of Jan Pieńkowski’s silhouette illustrations for the Joan Aiken books I used to read when I was little. Click on each photograph to enlarge and zoom in  and you can check out some of the detail for yourselves!

Each ‘Rondo-Progression’ has a different theme (unfortunately, I forgot to note them down, bad blogger, slaps wrist!) but I believe they were The Arts, Food, Leisure and Work. My favourite is probably The Arts with its striking centre-piece of the two Chinese theatre masks and loads of other dynamic pictures surrounding it – it’s almost like it’s alive with movement!

You can’t really tell from the pictures (which have distorted the light reflections weirdly) but these are made from copper, which is even more stunning and vivid in real life – and I loved the way the light reflected and bounced off these pieces, making them even more vibrant.

It seems a shame that these are tucked away in a place most people wouldn’t even notice so hopefully this post does its bit to show them off to the rest of the world!

Grand Cuisine Shanghai Kitchen restaurant review – bao down for the best xiao long bao in Hong Kong!

Now for a blog that’s short on pictures but long on love… a review of one of my favourite restaurants in Hong Kong, Grand Cuisine Shanghai Kitchen.

My boyfriend has a stock list of restaurants he suggests whenever I ask where we should go for lunch: McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, Express Teppanyaki and instant noodles from 7-Eleven. Yup, he’s a classy sort. So imagine my surprise when one day, having been dating him and asking this same question for at least 18 months, he suddenly threw ‘Shanghainese’ into the mix.

Which Shanghainese did he mean? Hong Kong has its fair share of good but now overrated Shanghainese joints – the New York Times apparently reckons that the Michelin-starred Din Tai Fung is one of the ten best restaurants in the world (I can think of ten better in Hong Kong!) and it regularly features on blogs battling for the title of ‘best xiao long bao in HK’ with another Shanghainese called Crystal Jade (curiously neither actually originate from China). In fact, he meant neither of these places and his choice of Grand Cuisine, tucked away near his old work place in Quarry Bay, has xiao long bao that blow those two out of the water.

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