Life.Culture.Discovery.

This week in PostMag: Hong Kong’s bamboo scaffolding and a Bali bone healer

See how the Venice Biennale is discovering an iconic Hong Kong builders’ craft, meet debut novelist Jemimah Wei, and try an Italian coffee with Chinese characteristics

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Hong Kong’s iconic bamboo scaffolding features on the cover of this week’s print edition. Photo: Jocelyn Tam

Published: 12:45pm, 19 Jul 2025Updated: 10:44am, 25 Jul 2025

As I read our cover feature this week, I started thinking about the overlap between a bamboo scaffolding master’s craft and my own as the editor of a magazine. Hear me out for a second. They’re both tactile endeavours, requiring craftsmanship and an attention to the little things. Each of us takes building blocks – words and images or poles and ties – to construct something greater than the sum of its parts. And most of all, both have an unmistakable human touch. “There’s always a human hand behind it,” says a bamboo scaffolding master in Christopher DeWolf’s piece. It’s a line that’s stuck with me.

DeWolf’s story takes us first to Venice, where a crew from Hong Kong has wrapped the courtyard of a historic villa in bamboo for this year’s Biennale of Architecture, and back here to our own city, where officials have proposed replacing bamboo with steel even while other countries are just realising the natural material’s huge potential.

Elsewhere in our features, Winnie Chung chats with Singaporean novelist Jemimah Wei, whose debut The Original Daughter is already making waves internationally. The up-and-coming author shows a side of Singapore apart from the glitz and glam the city state is known for, focusing on the “claustrophobic intimacy of public-housing life”. Wei toiled over the novel for more than 10 years, estimating that she wrote well over a million words. Quite the endeavour indeed.

Back in Venice, Zhaoyin Feng meets the Chinese migrants now staffing many of the city’s coffee bars. It’s a story that dives into the question of authenticity and cultural identity, played out through espresso pulls and Aperol spritzes. My favourite bit? Learning that one young barista honed her coffee-making skills via YouTube and Douyin, a thoroughly modern-day twist.