The composition of Emily Allchurch’s Towers of Babel Hong Kong (2024) takes inspiration from English artist and architect Joseph Gandy’s 1836 painting Comparative Characteristics of Thirteen Selected Styles of Architecture, a survey of different cultural and historical architectural styles stacked in a layered elevation. In her re-imagining for the territory of Hong Kong today, Allchurch presents three soaring towers cast in the golden hour light before dusk, placed in front of a characteristically Hong Kong mountainscape, with the towers of Shenzhen rising hazily in the distance.

On the lower tiers, the hustle and bustle of everyday Hong Kong life is depicted, with traditional commercial shops, street hawkers and restaurants jostling with trendy food outlets and retail gentrification. Whilst the outer towers show a mixture of residential architecture, including public housing and high-end speculative development, the central tower displays examples of traditional colonial and Cantonese style architecture from Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Stacked above, designer retail and luxury hotel accommodation are set around a ‘dragon gate’ for good Feng Shui, atop of which monolithic and grandiose corporate architecture towers ever skywards.

Dotted all around the scene are the accoutrements of tourism, leisure and regeneration in this depiction of a forward-looking Hong Kong repositioning itself following the Covid-19 pandemic and celebrating its unique identity, both historically and geographically (its verticality, proximity and co-existence with nature), whilst also acknowledging the increasing connectivity with mainland China.