I just left Hong Kong. Since I last wrote, I spent a month and a half in Shanghai, a week in Guangzhou (with my lovely friend Angela Xiao), and five nights in HK. I just checked out of this nice hostel on a street that happens to be a big thoroughfare for many of the protestors right now. Honestly, I’m not sure how much I should share about the events going on, considering I’m back in Ch*na now, but I guess if you’d like to hear about things going on in the city from someone who has been there and seen these things firsthand, call me/beep me (if you wanna reach me).

The primary subject of today’s post is a nice gentleman named Dave Chow. I stumbled upon him quite by accident two nights ago while walking up and down Hong Kong’s busy famous goldfish market street. Walking amongst the busy crowd on the sidewalk, I caught a glance of a cool-looking second-story storefront with a beautiful tank in the window, and so I tore off into a side street and climbed up a flight of stairs to check it out. Boom. I step into a room full of these absolutely gorgeous fish tanks of various sizes, hand-arranged and detailed so immaculately, so painstakingly, that I had to bug the bald guy in glasses cleaning one of them to tell me who put it all together. This man happened to be Dave.

His store is like the Apple Store of aquarium shops, clean and minimal and bright, with brilliant colorful displays shining behind sheets of glass. We talked for a long, long time. Only after I left and looked him up did I learn Dave was VERY well-known in a VERY niche international community. I mean, I thought he was special, given how singularly beautiful his aquariums were, but like, the dude has videos on Youtube with a million-plus views. Look him up, he’s cool. Also, at this point, I’ll admit the title of this blog post is clickbait. But still, even though he’s not a beauty influencer, a bunch of aquarium nerds (including me now) follow his work avidly online.

Dave Chow (I didn’t take this pic, it’s from the iNtErNeT)

Something you should know: Dave is known throughout the world as an award-winning aquascaper, and for those at home unfamiliar with the term, this means that Dave is a master in the art of arranging natural materials and elements in a freshwater aquarium to create a cohesive scene completely underwater. Wikipedia calls it “underwater gardening,” but Dave insists the hobby is a lot more nuanced than that. It’s part gardening, sure, but also a bit of sculpture, painting, architecture, and animal husbandry. The scale at which aquascaping can be done ranges from small five-gallon nano-tanks kept in offices to massive hundred-thousand-gallon exhibits at public aquariums. It all began with the Dutch, who pioneered their own lush garden-style tanks in the 1930’s, but the current incarnation of the hobby is largely indebted to the late Japanese aquarist Takashi Amano, who revised European aquascaping by incorporating artistic elements from Japanese gardening and Buddhist wabi-sabi tradition, pioneering the now-ubiquitous Nature Aquarium (NA) style, and a distinctive standard to which all contemporary aquascapers owe their craft to. Nowadays, aquascaping is a worldwide hobby. Dave’s Hong Kong aquarium and aquascape store caters to the many aquarium hobbyists in the region, as well as local clients who want custom designed freshwater fish tanks in their own homes and offices.

Dutch style scape. Honestly I don’t really like these. They look too colorful. Colors are gross.

As the above image demonstrates, Dave is damn good at what he does. I’ll include some photos of his tanks I found online, but the centerpiece tank I saw in his shop blows everything here (and everything I’ve ever seen) out of the water. It’s this absolutely huge rimless glass aquarium with a sloping dirt bottom, with these beautiful stone mountains rising skyward at an angle. Descending from these stone structures are long, winding driftwood roots, drifting downward like windswept trees. The tank is blooming with a variety of aquatic plants, though none are so large as to obscure the centerpiece stones. I wish I could’ve snapped a pic, but this tank’s aquascape is under wraps. It’s apparently a work-in-progress for a competition next year.

As I spoke to Dave, I quickly became aware that he views aquascaping as not only a hobby and a craft, but a truly unique art form, a breed of visual communication and expression that he has fallen in love with over the years. For Dave, aquascaping is a practice spiritually descended from sculpture and drawing, but also Chinese calligraphy, Classical Chinese poetry, bonsai dioramas, and Zen gardening. When I began to tell him about my own artistic project, which ties poetry and aquarium-keeping together under the concept of containment, he was intrigued, telling me that he actually sees his own work as closer to that of poet than a fish keeper or gardener. There is a big difference, he says, between a craftsperson and an artist. Anyone can learn the techniques required to build an aquascape, and anyone can use those techniques to emulate, stone-by-stone, plant-by-plant, the styles they see, but it takes an artist to devise a vision, and more specifically, a narrative behind each tank. Aquascaping, in Dave’s mind, always demands craft, but a truly good piece of art depends on the vision.

His own self-described aquascaping style is a cross between biotope (a style in which the artist tries to depict specific regional natural habitats as accurately as possible) and Nature Aquarium style (the Asian landscape painting inspired style pioneered by Amano), with a dash of diorama (a newer style that uses aquatic plants and rock/wood elements to create miniature terrestrial landscapes like hills, mountains, and forests). Although the “all-natural” biotope style is rapidly gaining popularity in the hobby these days, Dave knows that aquascaping depends upon the human touch, and it is the creator’s artistic vision that gives life to the tank, rather than its simulated accuracy to nature. At the end of the day, Dave says, these are just glass boxes. These boxes are not true representations of nature, but reflections of the artist who fills them.

Dave begins his scapes by painstakingly sketching a 2D scene on paper, then erasing bits and pieces and making edits. This can take a long time, but for him, the sketch must occur before he actually procures the materials and plants and fish, and brings the elements together to reflect the vision on paper. “It’s an experience to see it move from 2D to 3D,” he tells me. Every piece is given a short and evocative title, like “Phoenix Reborn,” or “Journey to Bari,” which he believes is very important to an aquascape. Lately, he says, he has thought about deploying longer and more unorthodox titles, perhaps even taking an old Chinese poem and using its entire body of text as a scape title, in an effort to evoke even more of a narrative and to strike a chord with a Chinese audience. Dave dreams of one day holding his own show at a professional art gallery, featuring his tanks in all their typical planted splendor, but also incorporating human elements into the natural imagery such as Chinese painting and calligraphy.

Back to the process. Once the elements of the scape are in place, and the tank is planted and stocked with fish, the scenery begins to grow and mature over the weeks, assisted by Dave’s pruning scissors and his careful eye. As I brought up the topic of fish in our conversation, he reminded me that when it comes to his work, fish and other aquatic animals are only one part of a much larger equation. The natural and compositional harmony within the tank includes the creatures, but also the plants, stone and wood elements, and soil/substrate. When I asked him what fish he plans to place in the massive new tank he is preparing for next year’s aquascaping contest, he told me he wasn’t sure, but probably something “long and slender and small, because this piece has such strong lines.” The sharp rocks point upward at a rightward diagonal angle, while driftwood tree branches arch downward, intersecting almost perpendicularly with the rock line. The plants are mostly low the ground, allowing the striking hardscape of wood and stone to stand strong. The plant-in-progress looks like an old Japanese painting with its incredibly harsh and detailed mountains, and its fallen trees, shrouded in greenery.

When I asked Dave about his relationships with other hobbyists in this field, we began a very illuminating discussion about the nature of art. For him, aquascaping absolutely requires communication and community—this art form cannot be done in a vacuum, but must respond to the works and ideas of other scapers, whether they are masters/mentors, peers, competitors, or students of the art. Dave travels internationally many times a year to teach workshops, compete in tournaments, visit landmark aquariums, and meet friends and colleagues. Without the community of hobbyists who produce work alongside him, the art doesn’t have any meaning. I feel the same way about my relationship with other writers and poets. Without my fellow writers and the wonderful workshops I’ve been lucky enough to be a member of (shoutout Ralph Savarese and Dean Bakopoulos), I’d be writing into the void, and I would never have grown into my own voice the way I have.

Honestly, I have so much more to say when it comes to Dave and aquascaping, but I thought this would be a fascinating little tidbit to put out there. Setting up a fish tank isn’t seen by most of the world as an art form, and even many aquarium hobbyists see aquascaping as something more to do with beauty than real artistic merit or creative expression. Anyway, since I’m working on a project that is essentially about the nature of art and the lives of artists, in which the main character relates to his evidently non-artistic profession (gambling on betta fish fights) in artistic terms, and other characters do the same with other seemingly non-artistic fields, I wanted to hear about how Dave views other aquarium related hobbies. We also spoke a lot about fish fighting (bettas) and selective breeding (goldfish and arowanas). I’ll write something up on that later. Just wanted y’all to know I’m doing well, and I’m bouncing around meeting cool-ass people and artists.

“Whisper of the Pines” - Serkan ÇETİNKOL

Very unrelated note, (cw: animals killing each other) I saw a stray frog hop into a fish shop on the ground floor of the market, and the lady who ran the shop picked it up and tossed it into a tank full of baby Arowanas and Jack Dempsey cichlids, who proceeded to maul the shit out of it. Like I could see the frog legs just sticking out of the biggest cichlid’s mouth, twitching and being weird and stuff. Freaky deaky, as they say. I’m definitely writing a short story that features this scene at this very moment. Anyway, much love, friends. Stay dry and uneaten.

ok, I’m ending on this pic of famed Japanese founder of aquascaping, Takashi Amano, looking sexy asf

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