Keith Macgregor Is Bringing Hong Kong Neon Back to Life

Over the years, Keith Macgregor has taken an enormous number of photos of Hong Kong’s neon signs — about “eight or nine hundred,” by his reckoning. But it wasn’t always his mission. When he first moved to Hong Kong in 1970, he took them for granted, like almost everyone else at the time. 

“It was like living wallpaper,” he says. “You know, that’s just what you would see in Hong Kong. It was only much later, really, that I started to appreciate and look more closely at just how extraordinary this tableau of artworks was.”

In 2002, Macgregor was the first photographer to dedicate an entire volume of work to Hong Kong’s neon in his book Neon City Hong Kong. Now he is back with another, even more ambitious book, City of Lights, which will be accompanied by an exhibition at Blue Lotus Gallery opening on 18 June, followed by a talk between Macgregor and his co-author, neon conservationist Cardin Chan, on 20 June. 

“Keith’s body of work constitutes one of the largest photographic archives of Hong Kong’s streets and neon signage,” says Chan, a longtime contributor to Zolima CityMag and founder of the cultural heritage company The Indispensible Hong Kong. “For those of us committed to preservation, it is an invaluable visual record.”

For Macgregor, who is now 80, it was a chance to revisit an extraordinary period when Hong Kong was illuminated by tens of thousands of neon signs. Following a regulatory change in 2010 — a topic explored in Neon Is Not Dead, our second Zolima Culture Guide — nearly all of the signs have disappeared, with fewer than 400 remaining today. 

“This was probably the most technically difficult book I have ever done,” says Macgregor. Getting the printing quality just right was a challenge, given the dynamic glow and wide colour spectrum produced by neon. Macgregor also took it upon himself to create intricate collages depicting hundreds of neon signs. “The one on the cover has about 200 different signs all layered on top of each other,” he explains. “It took me about 200 hours of work.”

And yet Macgregor has regrets. There’s even more he could have done, he says. To understand why, let’s go back to his early days in Hong Kong — a city in which he never intended to live. 

An unexpected turn of events

Speaking by phone from his holiday house in Croatia, Macgregor’s precise enunciation and melodic accent betray his origins. Born in India to British parents who were there for the war, he spent the first year of his life in Hong Kong, then three years in Kuala Lumpur, followed by a decade in Kenya. From there he was sent to the UK for school, after which he studied history at Oxford. His parents moved back to Hong Kong in 1959 and he grew up spending his summer holidays here. After graduating, he set off for New York in 1968 without a particular plan in mind.

“I got a pretty boring job working as a management trainee,” he says. “It wasn’t my bag, really. But it taught me quite a bit. It taught me that I was unemployable, basically.”

Dismayed by the corporate world, Macgregor decided to explore his interest in photography. He taught himself how to develop black-and-white photos and converted the kitchen of his Upper West Side apartment into a darkroom. “I can still remember the first time I saw an image coming out of the water,” he says. “It was so exciting — not that it was a great picture.”

Things took an unexpected turn in 1970 when Macgregor’s father suddenly died. He dropped everything to come to Hong Kong and take care of his bereaved mother. “She said, ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ And I said, ‘Well, I taught myself to print [photographs] in New York and I can’t possibly work for Jardine Matheson or Swire or Hongkong Bank.’ So I decided to be a photographer.”

Dai Kum Lung Massage Parlour’s neon sign. Photo by Keith Macgregor

He had no real training. “I had hardly read a book,” he says. But he had a convenient mentor: Macgregor’s next-door neighbour was the renowned photojournalist Larry Burrows, who used Hong Kong as a base while he covered the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. He also met the renowned Hungarian-American photographer called Bela Kalman while in Angkor Wat with his mother in 1970; Kalman inspired him even more to give it a go.

“[Burrows] and I talked a lot about it and he said, ‘Give it a try,’” recalls Macgregor. “So I put an ad in the Morning Post saying, ‘I’ll come to your house and photograph your children for HK$200.’”

There was a surprising amount of demand. Macgregor used his income to invest in a proper darkroom, which allowed him to print large-format photos. That led him into commercial photography and what he calls his “big break”: taking photos for the shipping companies that dominated Hong Kong’s maritime trade.

In 1974, Macgregor held an exhibition of his photos at the Excelsior Hotel in Causeway Bay, which led to another big break. The local head of a company called Mandarin Publishers asked if Macgregor would consider using his photos to make calendars. He eventually launched his own business making calendars and “millions and millions” of postcards. 

All the while, he was running a fast-growing furniture and home goods business, Banyan Tree, with his wife. Even after they moved to the UK in 1992, the business brought him back to Hong Kong at least three times a year. On one of those return visits, he was lunching with a friend at the Shek O Country Club when the friend asked why he had never done a project on neon signs. The thought had never quite occurred to him. But he was intrigued.

“We got together and drove around town for a bit,” says Macgregor. “Eventually [my friend] stopped, but I continued. I came out two or three times from London and must have spent 50 nights going nonstop from Aberdeen to Tuen Mun and Yuen Long, photographing every attractive sign I could see, because I had a feeling deep in my heart that these weren’t going to be around forever.”

That’s what led to Neon City Hong Kong. But it’s also what triggered a pang of regret. After so many decades of photographing Hong Kong, Macgregor had only just realised how amazing its neon signs were. “I was a commercial photographer, not a photojournalist,” he explains. And even as he was making photos of Hong Kong’s streetscapes in the 1970s, 80s and 90s, he didn’t plunge as deep as he now wishes he had.

“I didn’t say to myself, ‘God, I’ve got to go out and shoot the rest of the bloody stuff from every angle possible,’” he says. There’s a good reason for that: he had two kids — “evenings at home were sacred — and two successful businesses. And in the buzzing heyday of neon, it seemed almost inconceivable that it would one day vanish from nearly everywhere in Hong Kong.

City of Lights

Whatever Macgregor may have missed over the years, he ended up with an invaluable record of Hong Kong’s neon heritage. The production of his latest book allowed him to dive deeper than ever into the world of neon. 

Thanks to Chan, Macgregor was able to meet neon masters and visit their workshops. “It made me realise just what an incredible art form it really is and how talented these people are,” he says. “Especially how they use Chinese calligraphy, which is so perfectly adapted to neon. Now when I look at a neon sign, I know how it’s made.”

That influenced his choice of photos for the book, which highlight both the technical ingenuity behind the signs and the “humour” that Macgregor sees in their imagery, which included everything from dragons to beer cans to giant red lips — a riotous graphic landscape that brought so much life to otherwise grimy concrete streets.

He doesn’t mince his words about the regulatory change that precipitated Hong Kong’s drastic loss of neon signs. “It’s ridiculous,” he says. But he is heartened to see the resurgent interest in neon — and he was particularly enthused to meet next-generation neon master Jive Lau. “He’s become a friend,” says Macgregor. “I just hope he’ll be able to continue along with the art — and I hope he’ll be able to produce more stuff we can see in the streets.”

City of Lights is now available from Blue Lotus Press. For more information on the exhibition running from 18 June to 30 September 2026, click here.