This well-designed extensive online exhibition gives Hong Kong’s distinctive neon signs their due. It features a wealth of background on the form, including a crowdsourced catalog of over 2,300 photos of neon signs, a map of neon signs documented throughout Hong Kong and Kowloon, a gallery of the area’s famous neon signs that have been lost to history, interviews, audio walks, documentaries and more. There’s enlugh much good stuff here to preoccupy even those who didn’t have a prior interest in the subject matter. Anyone with an appreciation for urban scenery could lose an afternoon poring through photos of breathtakingly elaborate or peculiarly beautiful signage like these:

My favorite part is the nine-minute video in which famed cinematographer Christopher Doyle talks romantically about his experiences filming in Hong Kong’s neon-rich visual spaces. Doyle shot several key films for director Wong Kar-wai including “As Tears Go By,” “Fallen Angels” and “Chungking Express,” which are in their way portraits of the city and its electric nighttime landscape. Those movies are practically iconic now in that they present a fin de siècle vision of Hong Kong as kind of visually lyrical fever dream—that, and the fact that they’re fantastic narrative works, too. I highly recommend them to anyone who hasn’t seen them.

View the entire exhibition at Neonsigns.hk.