A Punk Zine in the “World’s Most Expensive City”

Mau1, a new collective, is trying to uplift young, struggling artists in Asia’s financial hub.

It’s never been easy to be an artist in Hong Kong. Dubbed the “most expensive city in the world” by Mercer in 2024, the city’s raves are getting pricey and rent is increasing. Here, where the fifth largest international stock exchange resides and where investments in companies like POP MART and Xiaomi have doubled fortunes in only a year, artists are feeling the squeeze: No more studios to create new artwork, no more event spaces for grassroots music collectives to host parties. Apartments grow tight and the tickets to that party you want to attend over the weekend are selling for 500HKD (64USD).

Two young artists in the city feel like they’re being priced out. “It’s bullshit. This isn’t what the culture is about, you know? Raves aren’t about burning money,” says Julian Chan, who sprinkles jagged expletives into a jaded manner of speech and—in the two times I’ve met him—always seems to be dressed like a character in a Wong Kar-wai film. Rain D.K.S., his friend, is sitting beside him. Donning a baggy black shirt, chains, and fingerless gloves, she tells me, “I want more punk shit in Hong Kong.”

The phrase “punk” rarely lands in the same sentence as “world’s most expensive city” and “financial hub.” But it’s one of Hong Kong’s many paradoxes.

So what do these artists do? They start a punk zine.

“I was at a dead-end job,” says Julian. Working as a docent at M+, Hong Kong’s largest and most heavily funded contemporary art museum, the 22-year-old became quickly disillusioned with the world of high art: “They’re gentrifying art and commercializing it. I feel like there’s too many restrictions.”

A phone call in the summer of 2024 led Julian and Rain to ideate a new editorial project and gather a nine person team, each with their own frustrations on finding a place for grassroots creation in a city driven by capital. In June 2025, they launched Mau1 Magazine, a publication with the tagline, “For the culture, by the culture.”

“ I don’t even like magazines,” says 25-year-old Rain, a part-time teacher. “ But my sister makes DIY punk zines in Miami. And they’re so fun, they’re so creative.”

You can get a sense of that in the actual print copy: It has the DIY feel of a zine but with glossy, laminated pages, carrying the same high-level production quality of a magazine. Unlike the restrictive contemporary art world that Julian and Rain are rallying against, the contents of the book are unconstrained, interspersing between a dark red MySpace-esque masthead, some handwritten poems on cigarette smoking, and a lot of grainy, high-contrast photography. There’s an essay on collaging as Daoist practice and an interview with a hardcore DJ, but most of the magazine is DIY art and photography, of which there’s no singular narrative nor guiding theme in the issue—only the messiness of aimless and endless creation of whatever it is they want to make.

Mau1 can be described as aesthetically punk—at art events, their booth is always decorated with mohawk-shaped spikes made out of duct tape and a see-through mannequin in chains. But it doesn’t necessarily share the radical politics of titles like Homocore or Punk Planet that defined the punk zine genre.

The defiant spirit instead lies more in how the project is sustained. There’s no hierarchy in the team, and the project is equally self-financed by Mau1’s nine co-creators. “I think it’s hard to say anything is punk now,” Rain says. “The punk aspects are in the ethos.”

“We’re not here to spread anarchy, or something,” Julian adds. “We just took similarities from what punk originally was.”

While Mau1 engages in the punk-y DIY practices, you do notice that the magazine is serving another subcultural crowd. You can see it in attending their June launch party, where a dark long staircase would’ve led you to a teach-in panel talk on Taobao, hyper-commercialization, and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Or, from the magazine’s name Mau1, or “踎,” which means “to squat,” or can mean “streetrat” (when made into the word “地踎”). Or, from their announcement video, which was filmed in the elevator of (what looks like) an abandoned industrial building. In the three-minute long segment, a masked announcer delivers a rallying cry on the state of the arts in Hong Kong: “If we leave the city’s construction to bulldozers and white collar contractors, there will be no more room for anything left to grow,” he says.

It’s starving artist-core in a way that’s very urban and very Hong Kong. But to whom does this all serve? The youth who, like Julian and Rain, feel squeezed out of an expensive city and a high-barrier-to-entry art market.

“I’m complaining all the time that everything’s so expensive and that I want more punk shit and that I wanna keep the culture alive,” says Rain. “And then I realize, oh shit, I have to do something about it.”

“When you go out and see all these events costing at least 300 bucks, how are you supposed to have fun? The right to have fun is getting scarcer nowadays,” says Julian.

These exact frustrations about accessibility form Mau1's publishing ethos. The magazine is bilingual, publishing essays and stories in English and Cantonese, and frequently translating writing from one language to another. There’s also no set pricing for the magazine; Mau1 uses a pay-what-you-can model for much of what they sell. While they do have a “sticker price” (200HKD for the magazine), it’s mainly used to recoup printing costs.

“We’re broke,” Julian says.

Rain repeats for emphasis, “Yeah, we’re really broke people.”

Creating from the economic margins, then, also leads to certain aesthetic tendencies. Promotional photoshoots took place at public playgrounds, parks, benches, and unmanned construction sites—and all at night. It’s the reality of a creative underclass in the world’s most expensive city: adapting to where public space is still free and where people aren’t looking. The bold, thick, and stretched typefaces littered throughout the magazine could’ve easily been pulled from a street poster in a Hong Kong wet market.

It might be hard to say anything is “punk” nowadays, as Rain says, but with enough time, nearly every subculture radically distorts from its origins. Hipsters started as a group of cigarette-addicted, tank top-wearing edgelords and eventually morphed into liberals who like vinyl and environmentalism, mainly in response to a shifting status quo.

An economy driven by consumption and the internet has turned identity into what you purchase and how you dress. “When the internet came along… We took the aesthetics out of subcultures and stripped them of everything else,” says brand strategist and TikTok oracle

Eugene Healey

. Subculture became less about your values, tastes, or things you did, and instead about what you bought.

It’s no surprise, then, that one of the Mau1’s main motivations is that subculture is dying and we need to revive it. “The way that most subcultures begin is value-based,” says Alex, one of the magazine’s co-creators. “Punk, for example, is based on DIY culture and anti-establishment politics. But now people think punk is just dressing with a mohawk.”

Besides,  ”Most of the people that call themselves part of the subculture, don’t actually align with the values. There are racists in [Hong Kong’s] arts scene,” Alex adds.

Subculture has been declared “dead” or in a “crisis” many times before. But regardless of what form it takes, subculture is, at the end of the day, about using style to reject the mainstream or the status quo. Whether you are a punk, a goth, or a hipster, the “mainstream” is a moving target, constantly in flux. “And when that stops making sense for you,” an essay in international punk magazine CVLT Nation notes, “It’s time to wonder if you are still on the same side of the barricade.”

What, then, counts as “rebelling against the mainstream” for a somewhat punk, vaguely subcultural magazine like Mau1?

“ There’s a lot of things in society that stifle your ability to, like, let it out,” says Rain. Mau1 is an anonymous magazine. Like many titles, there’s a masthead and a page crediting contributors to the issue. But many of the identities credited are pseudonymous, and none of the actual photos, essays, or artworks are credited. You can’t tell who created what, unless you’re part of Mau1’s community or are friends with the author. “You’re not gonna get fame from this,” Rain says. “But you get to put out what you really want. And you don’t have to worry about people judging you.”

In the end, it’s the radical human spirit for creativity that will keep subculture—whatever the form—alive. Towards the end of Mau1’s launch video, the masked announcer rallies Hong Kong’s young artists, punks, bohemians with a final cry: “Make something, do something, go out, and live. Let the world know you were here.”

Very few things in this world are stronger than the human urge for creation. Today’s creative youth might feel excluded from the mainstream art world, but they will always find a way to band together and make things—whether barely noticed or with millions of followers, whether their wallets are empty or fat with cash.

“We’re just a bunch of kids. We just decided to band together and make something,” says Julian. “If we can do it without financial support, I think everyone can.”

“We come together, we’re in person, we’re putting it into paper, it feels real,” Rain adds. “We feel like we’re living.”