For the month of July, the top floor of Central Market was turned into a wonderland in which everything had shrunk. There was a miniature Wan Chai Blue House with real-life details as intricate as the numbers and symbols marked on the wooden staircase and a criss-cross network of electrical wires mounted on the building’s exterior; a downsized Wing Wo Grocery on Wellington Street with more than 100 tiny bottles of vinegar, soy sauce and rice wine; a toy shop selling plastic “watermelon” footballs found in the 1970s; the now-closed Kam Kee Bakery, which used to sell old-style Chinese pastries; and the King of Kowloon with his calligraphy.
These are only a few of the 100 pieces featured in the city’s biggest miniature art exhibition, An Art Journey into the Past and Present Urban Reinvention, which captured the modern and old sights of the city’s 18 districts from a 12:1 to 750:1 ratio. The exhibition, currently in Tokyo, will tour to Seoul before returning to Hong Kong in November for another showcase for two months.
Carmen Poon, founder of the Joyful Miniature Art Association, which organised the exhibition, thinks that miniature art is a great way to promote Hong Kong’s cityscape and culture to the world. “In the 100 steps from one side of the exhibition hall to the other, you can get a brief introduction to the city’s history, food, transportation and everything,” she says.
Miniature art isn’t new. European royals and elite families in the 17th century, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands and Britain, would commission carpenters to make dollhouses, a move which indicated their elevated social status. In Asia, Japan is home to netsuke, one of the earliest forms of miniature sculptures, also dating back to the 1600s.
Today, there are miniature collections, exhibitions and museums around the world. Poon has noted that most of them focus on major global tourist attractions and famous fictional scenes. She gives the Miniatures Museum of Taiwan as an example: it exhibits models collected from Europe and the US, such as one of Buckingham Palace and another showing scenes from classic fairytales such as Jack and the Beanstalk.
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