Subculture Never Died; You Just Stopped Looking For It

Proof of new-ness from a basement in Hong Kong.

“ I have a lot of similar conversations in smoking areas in clubs. People [in Hong Kong] would come back from London or elsewhere in England and be like, Hey, this isn’t Shoreditch. This isn’t South London.  And I’m like, This is not fucking Mars, bro. It’s Hong Kong.”

This is what Arthur Bray of YETI OUT, one of Hong Kong’s most widely recognized electronic music groups, had to say at a recent panel talk titled “MADE IN HK” discussing the state of local culture. Roughly forty or so scenesters squeezed into the basement of Chungking Mansions—a building often (mistakenly) denigrated as the city’s ‘ghetto’—to listen to Bray, and co-panelists Eugene Kan, LOVELESS, and Baby Diwata.

Ventilation inside was poor. The basement was dusty, and while listening my eyes were in a constant itch. But the discomfort didn’t stop the panel talk’s organizer, Critical Mass, from squeezing in a marketplace of twenty-five independent vendors inside the venue simultaneously. Some of these included a cybersigil tattoo artist, a streetwear brand uprooted from the Hong Kong bouldering community, and a futurist jeweler. Both the panel and the marketplace marked the opening of ALT TOWN, a week-long underground celebration for designers and artists in the city. In line with Bray’s quote, the event’s ethos was simple: create a space for new subculture in Hong Kong; to chart the city’s creative future.

Such a task has grown more challenging in recent years. In an earlier decade, one might’ve thought of the city as an Asian cultural hub. When streetwear in the 2010s tapped into urban subcultures, Hong Kong—with its urban density, and with creative communities living in between Buddhist shrines and tight alleyways—became a curator’s gold mine. Besides, it was also here that HYPEBEAST was originally founded. What started as a sneaker blog quickly catapulted into a global media brand, helping thrust its own moniker—“hypebeast”—into the global lexicon. Local creators, however, will tell you that this influence has not stuck. “In terms of culture, [Hong Kong] has been so stale for the longest time,” LOVELESS, a goth DJ, said.

This year alone, the Hong Kong government allocated more than HK$9 billion on the arts, culture, and creative industries, but the vast majority of the funds are directed towards supporting existing infrastructure (such as education, high-brow galleries) or flashy, tourist-attracting pop-ups like the recent giant Labubu and Grimace along the city’s harborfront.

Giant Grime and Labubu…

Inadvertently, independent creators are often left fending for themselves, fighting for scraps. “We can’t rely on clubs and institutions to do things for us anymore,” LOVELESS added.

This might be one huge dose of copium, but this information becomes easier to stomach after realizing that a number of the most impactful subcultures have not emerged from New York or London—where institutional support for the arts is stronger and creative nepo babies per capita is greater. Instead, they’ve emerged far from these meccas of cultural influence.

To illustrate: Brazilian funk, an electronic music subgenre, first played at parties in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro around forty years ago. Today, it’s sampled by artists like Cardi B and Travis Scott, and more often, it’s the backing-track-of-choice in widely-viewed TikTok anime edits featuring anti-hero characters like Sukuna from Jujutsu Kaisen. The garish trance-pop of Snow Strippers tells a similar story: Long before the duo’s singles like “Under Your Spell” and “Just Your Doll” started playing on every corner of the internet, they were mixing turntables in Clearwater (a city in Florida) and Detroit. A 2024 profile in The Face put it best, saying, “Snow Strippers … were born and raised in cities you’ve possibly never heard of. Now they’re the hottest new band in New York City.”

Even among the dominant subcultures of the 20th century, reach and impact were entirely independent from funding and access to resources. Acid house, the genre that birthed the UK rave subculture in the late ‘80s, emerged first in Manchester, not London, when the city was in literal economic decline. Following deindustrialization, a mass of unemployed youth in Manchester had enough time and angst on their hands to repurpose warehouses (their former workplaces) into places to party.

These examples are not exhaustive. And they’re not meant to fetishize cities where institutional support for the arts and culture is lacking. But they are a reminder that real cultural impact is not necessarily tied to how much money you have; that great culture doesn’t always come from the centers of cultural capital.

“It kind of sucks here,” said LOVELESS, mid-way through the panel talk. “[But] there’s circumstances that push us to do certain things. In Hong Kong, we do raves at warehouse spaces because we can’t rent out a club. Other places don’t have those problems—but problems create characters.”

“Nothing’s given to you,” Bray added, directly addressing the crowd. “We can all move to Laos or Thailand and have cheaper rent, but everyone here who’s figured it out has learned a lot more in the process.”

In an interview with 032c, Lotta Volkova, then stylist of Balenciaga, famously quipped, “There are no subcultures anymore. It’s about the remix.” The idea goes that subcultural communities like punks, ravers, goths, etc. have been stripped of their meaning and values, converted into a set of aesthetics that fashion brands recreate and internet influencers mimic. That is, anyone can dress like a “punk”—eyeliner, dark jeans, leather jacket—without having the anti-establishment values or leftist politics that defined the identity.

The idea has grown especially salient among the cultural commentariat and some very online brand marketers. And it’s mostly true: the craze of acid house is today being remixed for palatability on social media, into an ever-popular “sober culture.” Its DIY ethos is watered down into a commercialized simulacrum: a collection of limp and extremely boring “coffee raves,” “sauna raves,” “cold plunge raves.” But the idea also reeks of a laziness to explore anything new.

Much of what was on sale at ALT TOWN is hard to describe. A few artists’ designs would “defy naming,” their oeuvres “[circle] a purely emotional dimension of existence that is difficult to verbalize” (as one bio reads). There were other merchants selling artwork depicting a space girl traversing different realities or fish-eye keychains stylized with Sailor Moon futurism, though I don’t think these are particularly accurate descriptions.

But I do think the lack of interpretive language underscores an important idea: these are subcultures outside the mainstream, and they are new.

“MADE IN HK” talk.

True creativity is the progeny of friction. As makers, friction forces us to pause and reflect in depth, challenging us to grow as artists and evolve in our practice. And here in Hong Kong, there’s a certain kind of friction to creating without institutional support. In absence of funding, ‘success’ often becomes defined by the culture you change.

“ Honestly, when I see a bunch of girls dancing in front of me when I DJ, that’s success for me,” said Baby Diwata, another panelist who co-founded the local femme rave phenomenon PANIC LIBRARY with LOVELESS. “We’ve been doing this for one year and we’re constantly just trying to evolve with the brand.”

As a vendor myself, I spent the weekend in that dusty bunker beneath Chungking Mansions. A friend joked that the space was something of a time machine. Our hours passed in a blink, faster than we could notice. I think it’s in worlds like these that the “new” is often created: divorced from temporality and in places where most people aren’t looking, we can create without limits.

If you read Volkova’s actual interview republished in The Business of Fashion, her claim that ‘there are no subcultures anymore’ is likely a misquote. She actually says this: “Obviously, there are no subcultures to be discovered anymore, at least not in the Western world.” I think of the vendors in the bunker, of the subculture that we create and celebrate in Hong Kong. I think of yet-to-be-discovered creative communities around the world whose works are entirely hidden and entirely original. Volkova was talking about new-ness, and how it emerges from places where you’d least expect.