East Asian Nights

A lady adjusts her make-up while looking at her phone in the middle of a street in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

There’s a particular quality to East Asian cities after dark. A page dedicated to night photography across Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei, and other cities in the region has an almost endless visual vocabulary to draw from. These are cities engineered for the night: spectacular lantern parades for Buddha’s birthday festivals, mysterious lights of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, neon signage stacked vertically up building facades, convenience store light spilling onto wet asphalt, vending machines glowing in residential alleys, cozy interiors of small neighborhood restaurants that you can glimpse from the darkness of the street, flashy signs of seedy bars in red-light districts…

What makes the appeal so durable is that the atmosphere is not a single mood but a spectrum. Tokyo offers, at the same time, cinematic precision in its business districts, a sense of glamorous decadence in its nightlife and red-light districts, and a particular kind of melancholy in its quietest backstreets. Seoul layers a relentless commercial brightness over older neighborhoods that still hold pockets of shadow. Hong Kong remains the great vertical city, where light cascades down towers and into impossibly narrow lanes. In Macau, you go from the blinding lights of the big casinos, where billions are turned over every night, to the dimly lit alleys of the old town. Taipei is warmer and looser, the night markets and scooter traffic giving it a softer human scale. Across all of them, humidity hangs the light in the air, summer rain turns every surface into a mirror, and winter cold sharpens the edges of every neon line.