PHOTO BY LILY ROSE
The 47th annual Hong Kong Arts Festival wraps up this month, but late-arriving art lovers need not despair—just look up! Many of the city’s enormous public housing complexes (known as “estates”) are works of art themselves. Photographer Lily Rose, who took this shot, was drawn to the Choi Hung Estate basketball courts after seeing them on social media. (They’re so Instagram-famous they were profiled in The New York Times.) “I remember being instantly in awe, so of course I couldn’t leave Hong Kong without seeing them with my own eyes,” Rose says. “I could have spent the entire day there observing and shooting.”
The Choi Hung (that’s Cantonese for “rainbow”) Estate was built in 1964 and was the largest public housing complex in the world at the time, attracting visits from Richard Nixon and Princess Margaret. Today, it’s home to an estimated 18,000 residents (roughly the population of Selma, Alabama), with five schools, two markets, a bus terminal, and a post office. “People of all ages were hanging out,” says Rose, who used a drone to capture all the action: teenagers taking selfies, elderly people walking laps, children playing video games, even a wedding party posing for a photo shoot. “So many colors and so much life!”
