The exhibition explores and spotlights Fung’s prolific artistic practice which spans social documentary photography, new documentary photography, conceptual photography, manipulated or para-photography, performative portraitures, digital imaging and photo-installation.

I unearthed a chapter of my family history from an old photograph: my grandparents once ran a small grocery store in Chai Wan in the 1970s. Yet, when I visited the site, all I found was a concrete wall. I ‘fossilised’ an assortment of goods from local stores into concrete boards – half-moulds-half-specimens. The voids captured in negative images reveal the ever disappearing cityscape through the presence of absence.

Naples-born, Hong Kong-based photographer Valentina Loffredo (b. 1978) art practice first began in 2013, when she started experimenting with photography and posting her images on Instagram. Her work was met with immediate critical acclaim, leading to a series of both solo and group exhibitions. Loffredo’s first photography book is set to be published in early 2019.

Her latest body of work, entitled Stillness, is an enigmatic visual-narrative sequence of eleven photographs. Through minimalist, uncanny compositions and recurring symbolic elements such as buoys, Loffredo draws a parallel between our life and the seascape, observing what happens after a sudden and unexpected storm.

The 2018 Hong Kong International Photo Festival spotlights the legendary magazine in a landmark exhibition “Provoke the age, the acts: 50 years’ quest for a language to come” curated by Tokyo-based curator NAGASAWA Akio. Through the eyes of a dozen emerging and prolific artists of the 1960s and 1970s – including Nakahira Takuma, Moriyama Daido, Tomatsu Shomei, Sawatari Hajime, Suda Issei, and the late Hamaguchi Takashi – we see the Tokyo of the PROVOKE era: a shifting metropolis in the midst of global upheaval, and a modern Japanese society in rapid transformation.

NAKAHIRA Takuma (1938-2015) is perhaps the most important yet most underrated figure in Japanese photography. A pioneering thinker and writer, he engaged himself in relentless interrogation about the theory and practice of image-making throughout his entire life. As co-founder of PROVOKE, the experimental magazine synonymous with his trademark “are, bure, boke” (grainy, blurry, out of focus) style, Nakahira helped revolutionise post-war Japanese photography and influenced countless artists.

Regardless, it was not long before Nakahira, a sensitive and deeply introspective person, gradually renounced his iconic style. Seeing that photography had pushed reality further away, he destroyed all his photographs in 1973 and set out to propose new theories and methodologies. Yet disillusionment set in, and ultimately he fell to the nadir of his artistic practice, suffering acute alcohol poisoning in 1977, with traumatic memory loss and aphasia. This series of events has contributed to his relative anonymity.

“Nakahira Takuma”, the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of work by the late artist, is curated by Taipei-based curator HUANG Yaji. The landmark exhibition is displayed across two levels of the venue as a way to examine the various phases of Nakahira’s creative practice from the 1960s to 2015: from PROVOKE to For a Language to Come (1968-1970); from ‘Circulation’ to ‘Overflow’ (1971-1974), and ultimately to his colour series (2003-2015). The exhibition illuminates Nakahira’s explorations in photographic thinking and practice, which eventually culminated in his shift to colour photography, described as a “view point devoid of subjectivity”, which stands in stark contrast to the directions taken by most photographers or theories of photography—particularly the mainstream perspectives on photography in the West.

In a very subtle way, nature and humans connect to one another. We tend to have such romantic ideas of personalizing our homes with decorative landscapes and sceneries, creating an illusion of being in nature. Indeed, we crave for nature and at the same time keep a distance from it. It becomes my interest to catpure glimpses of nature in the city — no matter how contrddictory and naive it may sound. The attempt allows me to think more deeply about our co-existence with nature. It is my attempt to conceptually transform symbols of landscape that are taking shapre on the streets, or vistas come together by pure chance, into landscape paintings/ photography. I also ventured into abondoned space, scouting about for sceneries left behind, and at times improvising sculptural landscape in derelict interiors, spontaneously casting terrains of the forsaken. Between the stillness of the realms and the disquieted heart, we experience nature as well as life.

The idiom goes: a picture is worth a thousand words. Leo Tsang, an Oxfam voluntary photographer, brings us to the remote areas of Gansu province to visit “left-behind children”. These children live in remote villages and hardly see both or either of their parents as many have headed to the cities to work. Tsang’s works capture their school life, poor living environments and everyday life with their grandparents.

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An early prototype of photographic technology, black and-white silver gelatin prints have become a classic since the invention of photography more than one century ago.

As the silver gelatin process renders post-processing difficult, the B/W images exude a sense of authenticity, purity and depth, along with exquisite yet, subtle tonal gradations, rich texture and luminosity, and of course the lasting, archival quality of the prints themselves. Many photographic artists prefer this analogue imaging process for the challenges it poses and the spontaneity and uncertainty involved – a conscious if not intellectual choice.

The “B/W Nostalgia” exhibition, organised by a group of Hong Kong photographers devoted to silver gelatin traditions, features the work of 26 artists. The series displays a diverse range of photographic and production techniques, from ‘straight’ printing to the more unconventional methods of wet-plate photography and platinotypes.

“Post photography” talked about the unlimited extension of digitalization in photography. Three artists Tang Ying Chi, Rachel Cheung and Fanny Mak (partnered with Siu Ding) working on other media are examining reality in imagery by transferring realistic photographic images into their works.