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Andreas von Buddenbrock, The Ink Trail Hong Kong, Blacksmith Books, 2024. 96 pgs.

When I moved to Hong Kong in 1990, I arrived with a long list of restaurants and other places to visit. It may seem strange that my grandparents, mom, and uncle told me about places they had visited 25 to 30 years earlier, but it was Hong Kong and lots of them were still there. The famous pigeon restaurant, Lung Wah Hotel, in Sha Tin. The Ambassador Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui. Jimmy’s Kitchen in Central. Most are gone now, but they lasted for decades, throughout massive construction and redevelopment. Nathan Road is almost unrecognisable today, yet many of the old buildings are still standing and would be familiar to anyone returning to Hong Kong after a long absence.

Some years ago, I came across Andreas von Buddenbrock’s Instagram site, which features his intricate sketches of Hong Kong, both old and new. He captured minute details of nature trails, the glitz and glamour of the Central skyline, and everything in between. I purchased a zine he published before the pandemic and he now has a book, The Ink Trail Hong Kong, which brings together dozens of his sketches with accompanying text to explain some of the scenes he has captured on paper. The book is divided into three chapters: concrete jungle, mother nature, and faded memories.

At the beginning of the concrete jungle chapter, von Buddenbrock explains that he found Hong Kong to be different from other cities when he first arrived thirteen years ago. He calls the towering buildings, both modern and crumbling, mixed with nature a “symphony of impressions”. And these impressions are beautifully rendered in his drawings. In this chapter, there are familiar sites like Man Mo Temple and the view from The Peak. When von Buddenbrock sketches a scene from the upper deck of a tram—three passengers sitting directly behing one another—he draws the shape of a tram window around this sketch, as if the viewer has a close-up view of the tram. He also uses this tram window motif for some of the other sketches in the book.

There are other scenes from Hong Kong that are more intimate and not of the type that appear in guidebooks. A window in a North Point flat with plants lined up on the sill. A sketch titled “Sham Shui Po, 2020” was drawn on top of Garden Hill, which illustrates von Buddenbrock’s “symphony of impressions” of nature juxtaposed against buildings, both older and contemporary.

Nature is emphasised in the second chapter and it’s rare to find signs of human life in most of these sketches. “The Explorer” in Happy Valley is a scene of overgrowth and mossy trees with an old stone bridge tucked away in the background. “Listen”, sketched in Quarry Bay, is another rendition of overgrown and trees with a nullah peeking out in the foreground. Braemar Hill features widely in this chapter and the others, and each sketch in this chapter shows a different scene: a waterfall, rocky hill, boulders and little stone towers, among others.

My favorite chapter is the one on faded memories. In one of the paragraphs at the beginning of this chapter, von Buddenbrock writes:

When looking upon these sites, I almost feel like I’m transported into a storybook or some other work of mysterious fiction, and it’s this very notion that I want to convey when depicting them. I can only hope that you, the viewer, are left with a similar feeling.

This reader certainly feels transported. Crumbling ruins are depicted in a couple of sketches in Mau Wu Shan, one of a crumbling arch with a view of buildings and mountains in the background and wild grass in the foreground, and another of a stone staircase that looks like it’s missing a wall. A fallen motorcycle in “Time Devours All Things” from LOHAS Park is covered with vines coming from the other side of a chain link fence. One can only imagine how long this motorcycle has been abandoned and why its owner just left it there to become one with the flora.

One of the last sketches in the book, “So Lo Pun” is an abandoned village, with more exposed staircases, brick walls behind crumbling cement, and remnants of Lunar New Year banners lining the front doors. The final parts of the book include a two-page spread about the author, as well as a couple of pages about von Buddenbrock’s sketching process and his exhibitions in Hong Kong.

The Ink Trail can serve many purposes. It can be a coffee table book, a travel guide, or just a book to savour during a break from daily stress. Just as von Buddenbrock has hiked and sketched to de-stress in Hong Kong so can the reader take a break from the daily grind and enjoy these peaceful scenes he has sketched.

How to cite: Blumberg-Kason, Susan. “Intricate Sketches: Andreas von Buddenbrock’s The Ink Trail Hong Kong.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 25 May 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/05/25/ink-trail.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair With China Gone Wrong. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books‘ China Blog, Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. She received an MPhil in Government and Public Administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Blumberg-Kason now lives in Chicago and spends her free time volunteering with senior citizens in Chinatown. (Photo credit: Annette Patko) [Susan Blumberg-Kason and ChaJournal.]

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