#084: A Ghost Mall
There are buildings in KL you walk through once and never think about again. Bangunan Pak Peng on Petaling Street was one of those for me. I wandered through it sometime in secondary school, took nothing in, and forgot about it. So when my friend Liza, with the Zhongshan Building crew, said they were taking it over for KL Festival, it gave me a reason to finally go back.
The KL Festival, held last month, was Kuala Lumpur's new flagship cultural celebration, anchored in the city's UNESCO Creative City of Design designation, and aligned with the Warisan KL aspiration. The whole show was rooted in creativity, cultures and communities. The festival activated Downtown Kuala Lumpur through heritage-led urban regeneration, transforming the historic areas into vibrant cultural destinations. I didn’t get to participate in all the activities, but I do think it was a success, based on all the stories I heard from friends who attended all the different shows.
So, I showed up at the Pak Peng Arcade on the second day, in the morning, with the camera around my neck as usual.
The building is old and shows it. The corridors are narrow and dim, and these days only a handful of tailors and old-trade craftsmen keep the lights on. Which is what made it a good spot for what Liza and the team had put together.
The whole thing was pretty relaxed. Vacant shoplots had been turned into makeshift exhibition spaces, drama classrooms and craft corners, each one its own little thing to stumble into. One floor had a workshop going. Another had a room full of chairs and photographs of chairs, which sounds absurd until you're sitting in it, pun intended. Elsewhere, there was karaoke, a DJ, fortune telling, and a guy getting an actual haircut in front of a painting of a guy getting a haircut. So hip.
It had that Zhongshan hub energy; the same loose, come-as-you-are feel that makes their Peszta gatherings more like a neighbourhood hanging out than a proper event. Dropped into the middle of Chinatown, it worked.
I spent a few hours wandering between floors, bumping into friends I hadn't seen in a while, and shooting whatever caught my eye. The light was all over the place. Morning sun came in at good and bad angles, and the rest was just the murky fluorescent tubes overhead. Not the clean light I'd normally go for, but it gave everything an odd in-between look that I ended up liking.
Hopefully, this is the start of something for the old place. It sits right smack in the middle of Petaling Street, one of the busier stops on the tourist trail through KL. Easy to walk past, easy to forget, until someone fills it with people and you remember it's there.
Cheers.
