Hong Kong is both a working destination and a sequence of sharply contrasting social scenes in Andy Warhol’s diary of his 1982 visit. The trip turns on the I Club, a project still under construction when Warhol arrived and opened only after a rushed final stretch. Around it, the diary moves between hotel suites, a fortune-telling venue, a private boat, a hilltop house, and the club itself, recording not a single view of the city but a chain of encounters shaped by hospitality, photography, glamour, and unfinished plans.

Arrival and the I Club project

Warhol’s diary marks his arrival on October 27, 1982, after a journey from New York. The evening was hot and muggy, with weather he compared to Florida’s, and the twelve-hour time difference meant that there was no need to reset his watch. Alfred Siu, the group’s host, met the visitors with Rolls-Royces and limousines. Jeffrey Deitch of Citibank was also at the airport; Warhol described him warmly and credited him with bringing the group into the project. The party checked into the Mandarin Hotel, where they occupied separate floors: Warhol was in room 1801, Chris Makos in 1020, Fred Hughes in 820, and Hughes’s girlfriend Natasha Grenfell in 722. Warhol’s suite looked out over the harbor, a beautiful prospect set against the repeated report that Hong Kong was in recession.

Soon after settling in, the group went to inspect the I Club, located on the first floor of the Bank of America building a block from the hotel. It was not finished, and the diary notes that only three days remained to complete it. They met its designer, Joe D’Urso, who said he had decorated Calvin Klein’s apartments. The project’s central contradiction was visible at once: a highly anticipated new venue was being shown to its prospective visitors while still awaiting completion. Warhol’s attention to the people around the work is as immediate as his account of the work itself; he presents Alfred Siu as charming and indulged, and D’Urso as untidy but talented.

Portraits, fortune-telling, and performance

On October 28, the group spent the morning looking for tailors on both sides of Hong Kong. Others bought clothes, but Warhol said he was not interested in them. Lunch at the I Club brought Alfred Siu together with about eight women whom he thought might sit for portraits. Warhol described them as a varied, competitive circle: one was an American married to a Chinese man, while the others included women he grouped as beauty-pageant types, among them Miss Taiwan. He linked their marriages to wealthy construction businessmen and noted their mutual dislike, framing the proposed portrait sessions through the social tensions as well as the glamour of the gathering.

After lunch, Alfred’s wife took the group to a fortune-telling venue. Warhol described it as crowded with thousands of fortune tellers, each waiting to be chosen. He selected a woman and asked about his love life. Her prediction—that he was married to a younger woman and was having problems—gave the visit an intimate turn without resolving anything about his relationships. The scene then shifted from consultation to intrusion: Chris Makos photographed some fortune tellers who were asleep, and the flash woke them. They chased the visitors out. The episode registers the limits of the group’s camera-led access; the people being photographed did not simply remain picturesque subjects when they objected to the camera.

That evening, Alfred hosted a dinner party on his private boat, reached by junk. He had imported a seven-person crew from New York to photograph the guests, but Warhol found them so objectionable that he did not want to remember their names. The party later went to Disco-Disco, a drag-queen venue. An English woman asked Warhol to dance and told him, “You’re not anything like what they write about in the papers,” to which he replied, “Well, I know that.” In a trip organized around portraits and photography, the exchange made public image itself part of the night’s conversation: the guest recognized Warhol through what had been written about him, while he acknowledged the difference between that version and his own presence.

The opening and the city’s unfinished edges

On October 29, the group crossed by boat to Kowloon and went to the Sius’ house high on a hill, where the diary says they could see all of Hong Kong. The imported crew followed them everywhere, an insistence that made the group’s movements feel continuously observed. The I Club’s pre-opening party was presented as exclusive and grand, though Warhol judged the show only okay. The gym was already in use. Someone put him on a machine that tipped him upside down; his pills fell from his pockets, and he worried that his hair had nearly come off. The detail turns the promised glamour of the club into an awkward physical episode, with Warhol’s carefully maintained appearance caught up in the machinery of its new fitness facilities.

The disco was completed only a minute before the opening. Warhol danced with Natasha Grenfell, pushing her around while drunk, and the expected portrait subjects did not materialize. Their absence embarrassed Alfred, who had brought the group together in part around the possibility of portraits. They slipped out at about two in the morning. The next day, the formal opening ran from 8:30 p.m. until 1:30 a.m.; Warhol returned home at 4:30. In the diary’s compressed chronology, the club’s transition from unfinished site to operating venue is measured less by architectural description than by deadlines, a last-minute completion, a failed portrait plan, and a long night.

Political awareness and departure

During the same stay, Warhol went to the Peking Communist Store and bought materials for ideas. He also recorded learning that Hong Kong was owned by China and rented by England, and connected that understanding to the nervousness he perceived as the lease approached its end. The diary does not develop this into a broader political account; instead, the information arrives as a sudden correction to his understanding of the place, set beside the practical business of shopping for materials and the preparations for the club opening.

The itinerary eventually moves on to Peking and then returns through Hong Kong. A November 6 diary heading marks the journey from Hong Kong to New York, and Warhol records taking Valium because he faced an eighteen-hour flight. Hong Kong consequently appears as more than a stop between cities: it is the setting in which the project’s uncertain beginnings and hurried opening become visible, and where the diary’s appetite for social detail repeatedly meets the limits of access—unfinished rooms, absent portrait sitters, unwilling photographic subjects, and the surveillance of a crew that followed the visitors from place to place.