海闊天空

Wong Ka Kui wrote Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies to mark ten years of Beyond, the Hong Kong rock band he led and co-founded. Its theme, personal freedom and holding on to your dreams, came out of his disillusionment with the music business. He had complained that Hong Kong had an entertainment industry but no music industry, and in 1992 the band signed with the Japanese company Amuse to build a career in Japan. Beyond released the song on the album Rock and Roll on 14 May 1993 and played unplugged shows in Hong Kong and Malaysia before returning to Japan. They never played together with him again. On 24 June 1993, during a Fuji Television game show, Wong and the host slipped on a narrow, slick stage and fell 2.7 metres, live on air. Wong landed head first and went into a coma. He died in a Tokyo hospital on 30 June, around seven weeks after the song came out. He was 31. Hundreds of people met his body at Kai Tak Airport, and his funeral procession brought major Hong Kong streets to a standstill. The song he left behind became his epitaph and something larger. It is an anthem of Cantonese rock, was sung for the Artistes 512 fundraising campaign after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and served as the unofficial anthem of the 2014 Hong Kong protests. In April 2022 it became the first Cantonese song to pass 100 million views on YouTube. A song about chasing freedom outlived its writer.