Hio Iong Wong, Alexis, Liu Zitong, Yu Dairui, and Luo Shudan

Artist Bio

The four members of the documentary team come from different cultural backgrounds and explore the cultural symbols of old Hong Kong as “new comers” of Hong Kong.

The Flower Code 花碼

Artwork Description

This documentary, The Flower Code 花碼, takes the menus of three time-honored restaurants in Hong Kong as a starting point to conduct a visual archaeological exploration of the Chinese character counting system — “Hua Ma”, which is on the verge of being lost. The film starts with the menus of Luxury Coffee, Liu Anju, and Hailian Teahouse. It retraces how this business code, which originated in the Ming and Qing dynasties and flourished in the Wu and Yue regions, took root in Hong Kong during the colonial economic wave in the middle of the 20th century and then regressed to become a fragment of the city’s memory under the impact of the digital age.

The camera weaves through the streets and alleys of Hong Kong, presenting the distinct choices of three restaurant operators: some insist on writing flower codes by hand to maintain the traditional warmth, some compromise by opting for a parallel use of Arabic numerals and flower codes, and others simply use Arabic numerals instead. Those italic numbers sketched with a pen are both an embodiment of prices and an imprint of time. Through the lens of the camera, we see not only the gradually blurring numbers but also how the fading collective memory struggles, deforms, and reconstructs in the light and shadow.