I have a young son, Michael, whom I take to playgrounds and while I’m there I think how dull it is, I look around and can’t think of anything more empty, or anything more repetitious than spinning round on a table. It does not stimulate the imagination, there is no creative play…This playground is not just a once and for all project. If successful, the Urban Services Department is interested in providing land for more, perhaps inside the city proper.

Paul Selinger, cited in an interview published in South China Sunday Post-Herald, October 29, 1967(1)

Paul Selinger arrived in Hong Kong in 1964, in his late 20s. He had earned a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and, answering a call for civilian service, worked as an art instructor at a US Army base in Korea before making his way to Hong Kong.(2)

With his Korean wife, whom he had met while stationed there, Selinger began building a life in the fast-growing city. Under British colonial rule, 1960s Hong Kong was a burgeoning trading hub where much of the population—swelled by a persistent influx from Mainland China—grappled with housing shortages and hardship. In 1966, Ocean Terminal opened in Tsim Sha Tsui as Asia's largest shopping center, and Selinger was commissioned to create a large-scale sculpture for its foyer. That same year, the Kowloon Riots erupted nearby around the Star Ferry Pier—a stark reflection of underlying social tensions.(3)

Selinger, who was trained in abstract expressionism, took his son to local playgrounds and found them monotonous. He proposed to the Urban Services Department(4) that he design a sculptural playground. The government accepted, allocating 32,000 square feet in front of the Shek Lei Resettlement Estate, while Selinger secured a HK$150,000 donation from the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club for construction. Work began in 1967, and Shek Lei Playground opened in September 1969 with a series of performances. It received sustained media coverage and was documented in the government publication Hong Kong: Report for the Year 1969—a clear sign it was regarded as a major event in the city.

Children's playgrounds in Hong Kong first appeared in the late 1920s. Due to limited resources, their design remained rudimentary well into the 1960s, typically consisting of Wicksteed equipment imported from Britain installed on concrete. The uniform results resembled what contemporary researchers criticize as "4S" playgrounds, or what American readers might recognize as playgrounds of the Robert Moses era.(5)

Selinger approached the project as a work of art rather than a mere public facility. Each sculpture was custom-made by local craftsmen, mostly in concrete and terrazzo — cast, assembled, and polished on site. The ground and an adjoining rock face were painted with abstract patterns. This sculpturally fluid approach was unprecedented in Hong Kong, where playgrounds had been designed by architects and engineers in a pragmatic modernist idiom, rarely offering more than imported off-the-shelf equipment.

Selinger taught art at a tertiary institution while pursuing his own practice, yet he appears to be the only artist in Hong Kong's history to have successfully approached the government to design a sculptural playground. Media reports note that he devoted himself to Shek Lei full-time and without pay. In contrast to the upscale Ocean Terminal, Shek Lei was a newly developed public housing estate on the city's outskirts, home to 80,000 low-income residents, half of them children. Speaking of this public art project beyond the white cube, Selinger remarked: "These children are being shot from sampans and hillside shacks straight into twentieth-century skyscrapers… I am projecting my view of life—the fact that this time it proves to be a playground and that thousands of children will use it, that it is fulfilling a functional purpose is important. But I have also found artistic fulfillment… people will begin to know me and I am reaching a far wider public than I would with a piece of work stored in a gallery or museum for the wealthy few to enjoy."(6)

Although all traces of Selinger's design were erased in renovations of the late 1990s and 2000s, former Shek Lei residents remember it vividly, affectionately nicknaming it the "Sand Pit," the "Three-Tiered Park," or the "Space Park." Mr. Lau Wang-tat, a teacher and artist, has continued to depict the playground from memory in his drawings and ceramics since moving away in the 2000s. Others showed me family photographs taken there in childhood, explaining that cramped housing units made the colorful playground a favored backdrop. Students from the neighboring primary school held PE lessons there; the elderly gathered to chat; couples spent evenings together; and at Mid-Autumn Festival, children lit candles around the sculptures. The playground even featured in films and TV dramas.

In Hong Kong: Report for the Year 1969, a paragraph on Shek Lei revealed Selinger's larger wish: "The playground, believed to be the first of its kind in South-East Asia, was created by American artist, Paul Selinger… He hopes this unusual playground will be the first of many."(7)

Did Selinger's vision come to fruition? Before Shek Lei opened, he had told the press that a second playground in another district was under discussion.(8) Yet shortly after the opening, he and his family returned to the United States. Shek Lei would remain his only playground work in Hong Kong. Back in California, he screened a documentary about the project to officials and campaigned for further commissions(9)—but appears to have realized only a handful of smaller play sculptures, nothing approaching Shek Lei's scale.(10)

The Hong Kong government did not pursue further sculptural playgrounds in any sustained way. Between the 1970s and 1980s, sporadic examples of architect-designed play sculptures appeared, though these were noticeably more orderly in form. Otherwise, imported off-the-shelf equipment remained dominant, with products from the American brand GameTime and modular "multiplay" structures growing increasingly prevalent from the 1980s onwards—producing a monotonous playground landscape across the city. As American safety standards progressively tightened from the 1970s, manufacturers and site managers gravitated toward more conservative designs, a shift that inevitably shaped Hong Kong given its long reliance on imported products. Compounding this, the city's extreme density and the intensive use of its facilities have made local site managers all the more cautious, wary of bespoke designs without a proven track record.

Over the past decade, as international researchers and activists have revisited the history of radical twentieth-century playgrounds, cities from New York to Taipei, Singapore to Sydney have launched corresponding initiatives. In Hong Kong, non-profit organizations such as Playright Children's Play Association and Design Trust, alongside landscape architects, government departments, and universities, have continued to push for change. In 2019, the government announced a plan to renovate 170 public play spaces.(11) Amid this wave of renewal, my historical research on twentieth-century abstract play landscapes in Hong Kong—taking Shek Lei as its starting point and published between 2018 and 2021—has run in parallel with these ongoing campaigns, generating some productive synergy.

One notable example is the Concrete Pipe Playground at Fung Mat Road Waterfront Open Space (also known as WE Park), which opened in August 2019. Commissioned by the Central and Western District Office and designed by Playright, it paid homage to Shek Lei, reviving the concrete pipe motif while echoing the site's location above a deep sewage tunnel system. Its three concrete pipe formations—modular structures made from sewage pipes of varying sizes—offered a tactile, open-ended alternative to the plastic equipment dominating local playgrounds. In safety-obsessed Hong Kong, they proved hugely popular with users of all ages. When the site was redeveloped as Sai Ying Pun Waterfront Park (opened December 2025), the three "play settings"—as Jacky Chan, Playright's Head of Play Environment, prefers to call them, rather than "play sculptures" or "play equipment"—were retained and integrated into the new design.

On the other side of Victoria Harbour, Playright designed a play space themed around "playful nature" atop the newly built Kwun Tong Sewage Pumping Station (opened 2023), a Drainage Services Department (DSD) project. Chan explained that the team wanted children to experience a range of materials, including concrete—ubiquitous in the urban landscape. One concrete maze in particular caught my attention: like the WE Park pipes, it carries the same play-sculpture DNA, and its vivid yellow paintwork brought Shek Lei to mind. Chan's account was unexpected: "The maze was originally designed to keep the concrete in its raw color, so that children could feel the material in its true state." Playground designers have often fallen into two camps: Selinger made abundant use of vivid color, while the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck pursued a pared-back aesthetic revealing materials in their unadorned form. A gray concrete maze was deemed unacceptable by government officials; after some back-and-forth, the DSD project team and Playright agreed to paint only half the surface, preserving something of the original intent while enriching its play value. Later, when a child bumped their head, Playright negotiated for the most minimal intervention—an A4 paper notice—rather than safety padding that would have dulled the tactile experience.

I asked Chan what lessons the past held for his work today. "Playgrounds will never return to being exactly as they once were," he said. "Rather than chasing a particular form or style, it's most important to start from need—because every era, every place, has to respond to its own conditions." From Shek Lei to WE Park and Cha Kwo Ling Waterfront Park, Selinger's dream of the sculptural playground, lost for half a century, has found its way back through winding paths. Yet contemporary play environment design has grown far more complex: no longer the expression of an individual artist's vision alone, it is a practice that demands user participation, inclusive experiences, and careful attention to management and maintenance.

Notes

1. Diana Molesworth, “An American Sculptor (He’s Also a Father) Is Designing Our First Adventure Playground,” South China Sunday Post-Herald, October 29, 1967.

2.   Edward Gamarekian, “Paul Selinger: Creator of Dragons,” What’s Doing in Hong Kong, November 1966.

3. The 1966 Kowloon Riots were sparked by public discontent over a five-cent fare hike by the Star Ferry. What began as a hunger strike by a few young men at the Star Ferry Pier escalated into large-scale clashes between civilians and police. The following year, the city-wide “Leftist Riots” broke out and lasted eight months. These successive waves of unrest stemmed in part from residents' dissatisfaction with the colonial government and the widening wealth gap. See Carol Jones and Jon Vagg, "The 1966 Star Ferry and 1967 Riots," in Criminal Justice in Hong Kong (Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 375–408.

4. The Urban Services Department was a Hong Kong government branch responsible for managing public facilities. Abolished in 1999, its park management duties were transferred to the newly formed Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

5.   The four "S"s stand for swing, seesaw, slide and sandbox. In Hong Kong, the sandbox is sometimes replaced by the swirl — also called a spinning table or merry-go-round.

6.   “40,000 children benefit from one man’s vision,” South China Sunday Post, August 6, 1968.

7.   Hong Kong: Report for the Year 1969. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Government Press, 1970.

8.   “Fantasy for fun, for action,” South China Sunday Post-Herald, August 17, 1969.

9.   Selinger’s letters to friend Leo Murray, dated June 20, 1970 and March 3, 1971.

10.   With the help of Selinger's family and online sources, I have been able to identify three Californian parks featuring Paul Selinger's works: Robson-Harrington Park, Christopher Park, and Broderick and Bush Mini Park. The sculpture at Broderick and Bush Mini Park, at least, has since been removed due to its irreparable condition.

11.   “Introduction,” Leisure and Cultural Services Department - Transformation of Public Play Spaces – Introduction, Accessed July 30, 2026. https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/en/pps/index.html. 

Author

FAN Lok-Yi is a Hong Kong–based curator exploring the connections between urban space, history, and the environment. She is Senior Curator at the Make A Difference Institute and co-founder of Open House Hong Kong. A 2018 M+ / Design Trust Research Fellow, she is the author of The Abstract Playscapes of Hong Kong (2021; expanded edition 2023).