Affordable Hong Kong homes? Look to the past in this colourful exhibition

Housing in Hong Kong is expensive and, according to various international surveys, the city ranked among the world’s most unaffordable places to live in 2025. Despite this, property agencies remain prolific, especially in Hong Kong’s more affluent districts, and their shop windows are always covered with posters of new tower blocks set against beautiful, computer-generated backdrops. However, the local property market has not always been like this, as a new, unusual exhibition shows. “Memories Per S.F.” examines Hong Kong’s past through a private collection of vintage sales brochures, tracing the evolution of the city’s housing market and offering a reminder of a time when a home was not a commodity that comes with a lifelong debt. The person behind the exhibition, who uses the alias Alan Wong Chi-yip – chi yip meaning “estate” in Cantonese – collected more than 10,000 brochures and posters over four decades, from the 1960s to the 2000s. His collection primarily comprises residential buildings in Hong Kong, with some commercial premises and overseas properties. Instead of today’s airbrushed photographs, the earlier booklets were printed with handwritten characters and hand-drawn illustrations – a visual language of a bygone era. More than 1,000 of those are on view at the exhibition at Artellex, a local independent photography, printing and art illustration studio in Cheung Sha Wan. Most of the brochure pages on show are from the 60s, 70s and 80s. By the 90s, computer-rendered images had started to be used, making brochures from that decade more conventional by today’s standards, according to exhibition curator Alex Chan, who founded Artellex in 2022. Chan says he was “amazed by the information and appreciation value” in Wong’s collection when they crossed paths in mid-2025. “These brochures are documentation of Hong Kong’s history – urban development and other changes through the decades, such as how the illustrations, which were made before computers became commonplace, were beautifully painted by real artists.” The exhibition is packed with items such as colourful illustrations of buildings, magnified to showcase their hand-drawn details; floor plans – Chan says they used to be “actually practical” back in the day – of estates such as Euston Court in Mid-Levels and Tai On Building in Sai Wan Ho; and comprehensive price sheets of different flats per square foot. It was from “per square foot” that Chan came up with the exhibition’s title, “Memories Per S.F.”, which speaks for itself, he says. “It brings back a lot of memories, from the style of the artwork to how life used to be back then and how environments and spaces used to be designed.” Some of the large, reprinted pages are paired with tiles that compare flats’ changing price per square foot with the city’s median household income over the years. Several pages from the original, smaller brochures are also on display. About 1,000 housing sales brochures across Hong Kong’s 18 districts have also been scanned, digitised and made accessible via a touch-screen display. “He has such a great collection,” Chan says. “We can really observe Hong Kong’s housing development in relation to how hard we have to work for a roof over our heads. There was a time when Taikoo Shing [a private residential development in Quarry Bay] was HK$500 per square foot. “Cross-reference that with how much people were earning back then – it reflects how housing was relatively more affordable. Even if you were earning HK$2,000 a month, you could still afford a mortgage payment. Now, a whole month’s salary may not even be worth one square foot. We wanted to present this phenomenon to people of all ages.” Wong recalls starting his collection as a child after seeing “so many new buildings and new developments being built around town”. He was initially going to collect newspaper advertisements, but they did not keep well. “Then, the first housing sales brochures emerged. They were colour-printed with beautiful illustrations inside, and they were free. I thought they were great. From then on, I’ve kept collecting them, even now,” he says. Wong adds that, in the 60s and 70s, visual exaggeration was common in those brochures, which portrayed the subject as much larger than its surrounding premises. After a societal shift in marketing, this misrepresentation began to be corrected in the 80s and 90s, when the buildings being promoted were more realistically portrayed. False advertising aside, Chan says the aesthetic choices in old housing sales brochures also serve a nostalgic purpose. “Even the handwritten Chinese characters looked different by the decade, and different Cantonese terms and slang were adapted. We hope to remind people of the uniqueness of Hong Kong culture.” “Memories Per S.F.”, Artellex, Unit 204A, 2/F, Sun Cheong Industrial Building, 1-3 Cheung Shun Street, Cheung Sha Wan, Kowloon. Tuesday to Sunday, noon to 7pm. By appointment only, on artellex.simplybook.asia. Until March 22. For more information, visit Artellex’s Instagram page.

Affordable Hong Kong homes? Look to the past in this colourful exhibition

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Artellex’s new show features images from vintage housing sales brochures, many originally hand-drawn, and affordability data over time

Artellex’s new show features images from vintage housing sales brochures, many originally hand-drawn, and affordability data over time