Let the Party Be Reborn
SLAP 拍, a new club in Hong Kong, is pioneering a grassroots model for the city’s nightlife and platforming the city’s underground culture.
Although it hides inside a maze of bridges, SLAP, a new nightclub in Hong Kong, has rooms both expansive and tall. The ceiling soars, and the space is free and full of possibility. Towards the dance floor, pink lights sputter overhead, animating bodies in stop motion. Breakbeats skitter and basslines growl as the DJ blasts drum and bass from the speakers. The baseline grips the room tighter, and moving bodies of friends and strangers fuse together. The bass echoes some more, inviting: Let the dance floor consume you. And let yourself become a part of it. I moved and swayed, and my silent reply was yes.
SLAP is ushering in a new, utopian vision for nightlife in Hong Kong. Here, the party is about community-building and the dance floor about camaraderie. Tracy Pang and Paul Henderson, the venue’s creators, are fully self-funding the project. With no outside investors, the clubbing venue’s operations are more grassroots. Events at the venue are created collaboratively—conceived by Paul, Tracy, and the artists they platform. Up-and-coming DJs and artists are put center stage without the need for institutional backing.
“I want my friends to have more opportunities to grow their audiences as musicians and DJs,” Tracy says. In her work as a DJ and photographer, her first opportunities in nightlife organizing were thanks to friends who believed in her work.
“People are always helping each other out, helping each other grow together,” she says. Tracy continues this practice at SLAP, by aggregating the city’s nightlife community into a larger collective. Current programming spotlights two popular music collectives like Abyss and Feed the Dragon, but also new musicians whose sounds are yet to be discovered by the mainstream. In platforming acts both established and new, Tracy’s just returning the favor.
In return, friends are eager to show SLAP some support: “I remember one time, just before the very first soft opening party, the room inside was [chaotic],” Tracy recalls. “But then, 10 of my friends came up to help clean up the whole mess.”
“We wanted to create a place that was truly grassroots, reflective of the underground scene in Hong Kong,” says Paul. “We wanted to take risks with what we put on, working with local DJs to create events that may not work for other clubs.”
Inside SLAP, you’re unlikely to hear anything from the top 50s. Their parties are abuzz with psychedelic techno, jungle, and deconstructed club instead, especially as ongoing programming strays from the mainstream. The venue recently hosted Cantopop DJs for “Hot Gossip”—an event inspired by a famed 1980s Hong Kong disco. Another upcoming party promises to mix the music of the city’s goth DJs into a “witchy” and “effervescent” night. “If we had a lot of investors, there’d be more pressure to do something like provide table service,” Paul adds.
The idea that clubbing can be grassroots and serve an alternative culture is not new, and SLAP’s creators acknowledge this. Before its commercialization across the globe, nightlife has always been a practice of the disenfranchised. Discos—from which nightclubs evolved—provided an escape for working class African American and Hispanic youths in the late ’70s, when the United States economy shifted post-industrial. Dancing was respite during a slumping economy.
In Hong Kong, outsiderness birthed the city’s mainstream clubbing scene. Back in the ’70s, homosexuality was still criminalized in Hong Kong. Gordon Huthart, the gay scion of a prominent family, would be routinely kicked out of discos for dancing with other men. Taking matters into his own hands, he created a haven of his own, opened a club by the name of Disco Disco in 1978, which shaped the city’s nightlife for years to come.
Today, what once was the center of underground culture is now the mainstream. Lan Kwai Fong—Hong Kong’s main party district—now stands five decades later in the area where Disco Disco once stood. Here, chart toppers, table service, and high entry fees are the norm.
“There aren’t that many places where I actually want to go dance late at night in Hong Kong,” Paul says. “Especially considering the size of the city.”
“People [in Lan Kwai Fong] aren’t going for the music,” Tracy adds. “They’re going for the girls and the drinks. They don’t care about the culture or about building relationships.”
Many have since called for something new. “It’s the same every night. Drunken escapism lacking creativity, and the number of bottles you order justifying your existence,” an event manager told the South China Morning Post, as early as 2014. Revenue for Hong Kong’s nightlife venues continues to fall, according to official data. In response, CNN asked in 2023, “Is the party over?” Others desire a return to the nightlife Hong Kong had before: “Nightlife is boring now,” declared an essay in Milk Magazine. “But you know, it was much more exciting in the ‘70s and 80s.”
Back then, most of Hong Kong’s nightclubs were actually in the Kowloon peninsula, across the harbor from where the city’s main party district is today and where SLAP is located—a history that Paul and Tracy hope to honor. Standing in its wake, perhaps it is here where the idea of a nightclub will be remade to reflect people’s desires: more creative, less commercial, and reminiscent of the more exciting parties the city once had.
Besides, “The majority of people in Hong Kong live in New Territories and Kowloon. So we're offering a level of convenience that others can’t,” says Paul. “We’re in the center of Hong Kong as far as I’m concerned.”
The night before Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, the city partied for 12 hours straight. In Kowloon Bay, 12,000 people gathered for “UNITY — The Great Hong Kong Handover Party.” Boy George was on the DJ booth, Grace Jones shook some ass, and Hong Kong danced as the city was reborn.
SLAP’s launch in December 2024 was a 12-hour party, too, welcoming new ambitious goals for the city’s nightlife. Among the first on the agenda? Using the soaring open space to exhibit the works of local artists, where clubbing becomes a “multi-sensory experience”—about sight as much as sound. In November 2024, the futuristic sculptures of Art in Outer Space were on display at SLAP. Paul and Tracy are planning more exhibitions of this kind.
But experimental art, niche music, and grassroots clubbing aside, both Paul and Tracy also hope SLAP can reflect nightlife culture in greater China, bringing musicians from the Mainland, Macau, and Taiwan to a new shared venue in Hong Kong.
“I’d love to be ambitious and say we’ll be the number one electronic music club,” says Paul. “But it isn’t about that.”
“What I really want is for people to feel safe,” Tracy says, continuing Paul’s train of thought. “I want people to know, at the back of their mind, that they belong to this place.”