The lacerating catharsis of body suspension in Hong Kong

Content warning: This article contains graphic detail and images that may be distressing to some viewers.

On the evening of January 31, deep inside a gritty building in Hong Kong’s Kwun Tong neighbourhood, Kivia Ki, a body modification practitioner is holding an event, hidden far away from the city’s surface.

To find it, you first need to navigate to the Hoi Bun Industrial Building. Then, you take a heavy-duty cargo lift, which shakes intensely when it reaches the right floor. After that, you forcibly pull the rattling metal gate designed to carry machinery, and enter the mysterious studio.

Inside, the high ceilings – originally built for factory assembly lines – now hold a different mission. Thick ropes are hung from the specialised rigging. Sterilised hooks are placed on a stainless steel tray. Ethereal ambient music, crimson light and flickering candles fill the whole space, creating an atmosphere that feels as if it’s summoning something divine. This is not a medical surgery, nor a horror movie set. This is body suspension, a contemporary ritual that Ki calls ​“Self-Ferrying”.

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In the centre of the room, a young woman, Mia, is being hoisted into the air. With every breath, her chest heaves, protruding the outline of her ribcage against her skin. The flesh on her back is pulled taut, stretched upward like a fine leather handbag, holding the weight of her entire skeletal frame.

After several attempts of spinning in the air, her body shivers uncontrollably. Later, when I ask why she still signaled for more attempts despite her apparent agony, she shrugs it off with a giggle. ​“It’s not that painful,” she says. ​“The real discomfort was the chill of the air conditioner.”

Mia is one of the voluntary models for the night. Different from other models, she doesn’t fit in the stereotype of a hardcore body modification artist. During the day, she works a ​“numbing” job to pay the bills. At night, she plunges into suspension. 

In Hong Kong, maintaining this duality is wearying.

“It feels like there is a red line running through this city,” Mia explains. ​“You are either on the ​‘sunny side’ – a good daughter living with parents, holding a stable job – or you are on the ​‘dark side’. There is very little room for a middle ground here. The East Asian pressure to conform forces you to split yourself in two.”

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For Mia, who identifies as queer but lives within a traditional Christian family, the pressure became a suffocating weight. Her body became the only territory she could fully claim. The moment she was hung up in the air, it was as if the minutiae of daily life and societal expectations were suspended alongside her – thoughts ceased, and only the raw reality of her body remained. The hooks offered a violent kind of meditation, leaving a magic, tranquil emptiness that transcended all of the heavy societal expectations that she felt on her.

Yet this heaviness is not unique to Mia. It is the defining mood for Hong Kong’s ​“Handover Generation” – those born around 1997, when Hong Kong was returned to China and ​‘one country, two systems’ self-rule was implemented. They grew up in a city of relative autonomy, though that reality began to cloud as they entered adulthood.

Since 2019, when millions took to the streets to protest against the proposed Extradition Bill that would have seen huge power transferred to Beijing, the city has undergone a seismic shift. Old street names are sanitised; familiar faces vanish into the wave of emigration; and the public sphere, once loud and free, has grown quiet under tightening controls. For young people squeezed into the world’s most expensive ​‘nano-flats’, the sense of agency is eroding daily. They can’t control the housing market, the political climate, or the future of their city. Body suspension within that context, becomes a visceral reclamation of sovereignty. If the city no longer feels like theirs, at least their pain, their skin, and their sensation still belong solely to themselves. 

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For Mia, pain is a transcendence. For Ki, the artist behind the night, pain is a vehicle for truth. ​“Pain is honest. It can’t be fake,” she explains. ​“So when the hooks go through my skin, there’s no lying to myself. For many people, including me, that moment of absolute honesty actually feels like relief.”

Kivia identifies herself as a ​“guardian”– a keeper of the space who ensures that everyone is safe, both physically and spiritually. She has studied ancient body suspension traditions like the Sun Dance and Hindu rituals. It’s an underground practice that has also seen people participate in the West, with Dave Navarro – former guitarist of Jane’s Addiction and Red Hot Chilli Peppers – being perhaps its most famous proponent.

Yet in Hong Kong, this high-pressure city, Ki has tried to remove any religious dogma. She reframes the event psychologically. ​“In my version, ​‘God’ becomes ​‘knowing yourself’, ​‘sacrifice’ becomes ​‘surrender to yourself’, and ​‘atonement’ becomes ​‘letting go and starting over’.”

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Another model, a tattoo artist, requests that Kivia lower her suspension height until her toes could just barely graze the concrete floor. With seven hooks pierced through her back, she pushes off the ground and begins to spin. As she gathers speed, the hooks and ropes become her wings. For those few minutes, she isn’t confined by Hong Kong’s compressed density – she’s flying, and creating her own wind. It’s a terrifying, beautiful display of total control.

For the audience, the event is a unique, intertwined journey with the models. They see blood seeping from the puncture points on models’ skin, hear breaths gasp, and share the coldness of the room they feel. Therefore, they clap to encourage them, viscerally pray for them with eye contact, feel their heart grip just as they do.

There’s a moment when a model cries out of pain. Behind me, another audience member begins to weep. The space is filled with delicate sobbing. In mainstream society, showing one’s weakness is a taboo, and failure is unacceptable. But here, vulnerabilities and emotions are received and verified. And at that moment, the boundary between audience and participants dissolved. By connecting yourself to the models, everyone here builds a sublime spacetime that goes far beyond language. As Kivia puts forth, ​“Brave doesn’t mean unafraid. It means feeling fear but still choosing to try.”

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As the night ends, the hooks are removed. Bandages are applied over the wounds. The models put their clothes back on, covering the fresh trauma.

We ride the rattling cargo lift back down to the street level. Outside, the air is humid, and the neon lights of Kwun Tong are as bright and indifferent as ever. The city rushes on, efficiently as usual.

But for the people leaving the building, something has transformed. They merge back into the crowded MTR stations and cramped apartments, carrying a secret under their shirts. They have touched the void, and now they have returned.

Returning to the surface world, the city of order, efficiency and deadlines, there is no need to speak of the solemn metamorphosis we just witnessed. We simply part ways into the night – as silent accomplices in a reality that the rest of Hong Kong will never understand.

Sophie Liu is a freelance journalist and filmmaker.

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