After a relatively quick subway ride, and I’m not exaggerating, it was just 4 short stops, I arrive at my destination.
I get out of the subway, lost as usual, and stand on the same corner I always stand when I get out of this same subway at this same station and look at the map again, because there’s no way I understand where I have to walk.
Speaking of maps, now Google Maps has a live arrow pointing the way to go. I mean, I point my camera towards the street and a huge blue arrow appears, guiding me. What a blessing. Thanks, Google.
Anyway, I walk a block, get distracted by an animated sign showing some amazing shorts, look at the arrow again, cross the street quickly before I get squashed, you see, here there’s no such thing as respect for pedestrians, this is the jungle with AXL Rose’s background music. Then I see the mall, it’s called iSquare.
Of course, when I see the entrance, there are 4 escalators. I mean, there are 2 going up and 2 going down. Here I experience my first anxiety attack, why are there 4 escalators?! I stand in the middle and analyze the situation. The escalator on the left is much higher than the one on the right, so I guess it takes you up about 3 floors in one go. But my estimate might be wrong, and I may end up in another part of the mall, which may not be the part of the mall I want to go to, and well, we know how these things go! You end up trapped in some mysterious place from which you can’t get out and there, you perish. Without fame and without glory.
I take the shorter escalator, and I arrive where I believe is the first floor. Well, it could be the ground floor, but normally it would be the first floor. I’m going to the fourth floor, so in 3 more escalators I should be there. I go up one. I go up another. I get distracted because there’s Starbucks to my right, but no, I shouldn’t succumb to temptation now, my goal is to reach the exhibition. I go up another escalator. And I should have arrived by then, because I’ve already gone up 4, but apparently not. It seems that here the counting is different because I have to go up exactly 3 more escalators to get to the fourth floor. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve time-traveled and I’m no longer here, I’m in another timeline.
When I reach the fourth floor, there’s a line like a 1995 matinee to enter the club. Literally, full of kids under 25 for sure. And then there’s me. I’m not 25 and I haven’t queued for a matinee to go dancing since I was 15.
Here comes anxiety attack number 2, do I queue with all these kids or do I run away? I’m not a coward, so I join the queue. The usher looks at me. I look at him. I get in line.
As I wait, more young people arrive. I feel like I’m writing this post as if I were 90 years old talking about the youth trends of 2023. Not that I’m that ancient, but well, here everyone is young, what can I do.
I wait for about 20 minutes, which isn’t bad at all, the line moves quickly, and when I reach the front, they scan the code of my ticket and the guy tells me something very long in Chinese. I look at the guy talking to me and don’t dare to interrupt him because he seems super focused, so when he finishes talking and looks at me expecting me to respond, I look at him and say: sorry, I don’t speak Chinese. I say it in English, of course, because if I said it in Spanish everything would be much more complicated. He looks at me. Pauses and then tells me that because I have a VIP ticket – of course, I bought a VIP ticket, what do you think? That I’m what? – I can choose a surprise gift from one of the characters and he gives me two other things that I still haven’t quite seen what they are. I quickly respond: Gojo Satoro. The guy looks at me again. Says: one moment. He leaves and comes back in 3 seconds with a little box, a thingy, and another thing and then tells me to press a button on a machine and out comes a credential like I’m a student at the Jujutsu Kaisen school. Spectacular, now I have the ability to hunt demons with the power of my dark energy.
Well, I enter and there’s more queuing to do. Here in Hong Kong, one always queues from a queue. I move forward and the exhibition starts.
The first installation is good, it’s the chair in the middle of the room wallpapered with protection amulets against spirits (those yellow papers with Chinese characters, yes, you’ve surely seen them in some movie or something, if not, use your imagination), where Itadori Yuji starts his life as part of Jujutsu Kaisen. The explanation is longer, but the idea here is not to tell you about the story but about my experience. Anyway, I keep walking slowly, because there’s also this silent rule that if we start in line, we continue in line to see each installation and we don’t skip ahead even if we’ve already looked quickly. That gave me a bit more anxiety but come on, I’m not going to be the weird foreigner who misbehaves.
All the installations that follow show the sketches, scene panels, final versions, and also the animated versions of many scenes from the anime. Incredibly spectacular. The precision work, the details, the hours and hours of composition, character development, coloring, finding the precise facial and body expressions, frame-by-frame animations, the designs of scenarios and backgrounds; it’s so much information and so beautiful that it also gave me anxiety, but the good kind.
Now, all these drawing sections couldn’t be photographed. In fact, there were cameras above each of the vertical panels where they were exhibited; because of course, that’s another important thing to mention, here surveillance is silent. There’s no one nearby looking at you threateningly, but they watch you through cameras for every cm you move and if you do something wrong, bang boom, chan, tuqui, catapum and well. You pay or go to jail.
Finishing the exhibition, there’s a series of installations where you can take photos without guilt, and there’s also a mini baseball game where you throw a ball and have to hit some panels that flip over when you hit them. I tried 3 times and on the fourth, I hit one. Well, that made me question my demon hunting abilities, so I quickly got out of there and continued walking to the last post of the show, which is, of course, the merchandising store.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t pushing young people and grabbing notebooks, stickers, pins, notes, Gojo figurines, or frames over all of them. That’s war, my people, and you have to assert yourself to grab everything that disappears in 5 minutes. Like in clothes SALE where women fight over a discounted skirt, well, I fight with teenagers over a Sukuna keychain. That’s how it is.
Finally, I leave there a bit dizzy, and look for the escalators, then I remember that I don’t know how many I’ll have to go down to get to street level or even if at some point I’ll see the light of day again; so just in case, I go to Starbucks to have a caramel macchiato with oat milk. If I’m going to get stuck in the mall like in the Shibuya arc of Jujutsu Kaisen, those evil spirits are not going to catch me uncaffeinated.
In the end, nothing happened, no demon attack, I didn’t get locked in, nothing.
That’s why I decided to go to the Hong Kong Museum of Art, where there were 4 floors of various exhibitions and one exclusively for Renaissance samples from Venice.
Because if the Domain Expansion of Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t catch me in the mall, then let some Renaissance work catch me and end up in Venice, having a Spritz and eating mini pizzas.
JJK Exhibition – HK 2023
