July Special
1 August 2025Hong Kong’s Crime Classics Step Off the Screen
This summer, Tai Kwun dives headfirst into one of Hong Kong cinema’s most iconic obsessions: the undercover world. From August 1 to October 5, 2025, Undercover Underworld transforms Duplex Studio into an immersive journey through the city’s most celebrated crime films—re-creating legendary movie scenes, revealing rare artefacts, and confronting the real-life stories that inspired the fiction.
Co-curated by director Sunny Chan Wing San and Kristof Van den Troost of CUHK, the exhibition takes visitors beyond the screen. Walk into the smoky tea house from Hard Boiled, step into the psychiatrist’s office from Infernal Affairs, or relive the explosive gunfight from City on Fire. Each set places you inside the tension of Hong Kong’s most memorable undercover moments—where loyalty is fragile, danger is constant, and every decision cuts between light and shadow.
But Undercover Underworld goes deeper than cinema. Alongside scripts, original footage, and even film awards on loan from the Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers, the exhibition includes candid accounts from real undercover agents, psychologists, and filmmakers. Their voices expose the mental toll of double lives, the moral grey zones of covert work, and the uneasy truth behind the myth.
Tracing four decades of Hong Kong’s undercover filmography—from Man on the Brink (1981) through A Better Tomorrow II (1987), Protégé (2007), to The White Storm (2013)—the show charts how these conflicted figures have become cinematic icons, embodying the city’s own precarious “in-betweenness.”
Undercover Underground
Scene 4 of Undercover Underworld - “Battlefield”
Undercover Underworld unfolds as a journey in 10 scenes.
The exhibition unfolds across 10 immersive scenes, blending re-created movie sets, large-scale murals, and original manuscripts.
It culminates in A Better Tomorrow, a tribute to both John Woo’s 1987 classic and the undercover archetype itself—haunted, heroic, and forever chasing redemption.
A series of free screenings of Hong Kong undercover films on 4, 5 and 7 October.
The films will include:
- Mon the Brink (1981)
- A Better Tomorrow II (1987)
- City on Fire (1987)
- Hard Boiled (1992)
- Truant Hero(1992)
- My Father is a Hero (1995).
Undercover Underworld
1 Aug to 5 Oct 2025
Duplex Studio, LG1/F & LG2/F, Block 01, Police Headquarters Block, Tai Kwun
Monday - Friday 1100 - 1900
HK$25 (Regular Tickets)
HK$15 (Concession Tickets for full-time students, seniors aged 60 or above, and persons with
disabilities)
Free entry for children aged 4 or below
Limited tickets are also available for on-site purchase at G/F, Block 01, Police Headquarters Block,
Tai Kwun