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Following the experimental display in Phase I, the work continues to develop and expand, in Phase II it makes its way sporadically through various sites and locations

Just as Nathan Road and many other streets in Hong Kong, ‘Harcourt Road’ once used to be just another main route through the central and western districts. Since the umbrella movement, these places of bloodshed, tears, and memories have all come to symbolise the city’s history.

“Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise” – what Susan Sontag refers to is the ability of photography to create a duplicate reality and construct one of a ‘second degree’. But in the age of image overload, what is the purpose of reproduction in photography?

As a result of my absence at the 2014 movement, I tried to deal with this sense of memory loss and respond at the same time to ideas of constructed memories and hyperrealism in this digital era through a process of rephotographing, repeating and repositioning: recapturing public archival material such as the remaining street views of Harcourt Road from 2014 on Google Map, feeding digital images into traditional analogue processes such as film and solarisation, slicing a threshold for those lost and unseen to reemerge in a different form.

The exhibition continues with gelatin silver prints placed at various newspaper stands along Nathan Road, among a jumble of information, and the photographic images transforming into a black mirror, or hole.

Set out to bring together LGBTQ+ image makers and facilitate the development of their practices, and to carve space for expressions of the LGBTQ+ community, the exhibition is an outcome of Photography as Witness, Memory, Activism, and Recognition photography workshop led by New York based photographer, video artist, and educator TSE Ka-Man from 2019 to 2020 for nine emerging LGBTQ+ image makers in Hong Kong. Amidst the ongoing challenges in Hong Kong since 2019, Tse stresses the importance of a queer sensibility, of using queer aesthetic practices as a tool to reframe our thinking and to resist erasure.

I focus on the interpretation of memory, observing its properties concerning my self- reflection of repeatedly uprooting from home. By dissecting its multi-faceted layers and stripping away the confinement of time, I try to capture the sentiments of longing and drifting by portraying static images in a fluid state.

The series of prints presented are inspired by pivotal moments in my life. Operating between painting and photography, the dim, dreamlike qualities in my works induces a feeling of transmutation and haze. The viewers are invited to immerse themselves and recall their own pasts.

The bloodshed of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre left an indelible mark on the hearts of many Chinese, including Hong Kong people who were reconciling the impact of the 1997 handover to China. For 30 years, we have commemorated the massacre every year in Victoria Park.

We are once again at a historical turning point in 2019. Despite the tightening political grip of Mainland China and the ongoing violent suppression by the government, millions of residents show remarkable courage and continue to fight for freedom.

Sham’s photographs and installations take viewers on an immersive cinematic journey through traces of these historical turning points. The June 4th candles collected from the past 30 years and the tear gas canisters fired by the police during the 2019 protests hold fragments of our struggle against amnesia, against oppression.

(Stories of) Little Beasts is a timeless photography project. Itʼs tailored, private and intimate for you. This is about your inner beast, combining your existing and unidentified characteristics, the ultimate form of realness and dreams.

As someone who will finally become history, the only evidence that you leave to the offspring could be about: a witch, a killer, an anarchist, a genderfluid, a past-life drowning memory, or other forms that are not humanlike such as Venus, a black hole, a tree, or a card reading.

We must become ourselves, and even create ourselves to refuse to be destroyed, also, to recognize our tribes, cults and histories.

Advocating “a better distribution of resources, a better sharing of mutual benefits”, the shared bike idea aims to pursue excellence and innovation. However, once the fad passed, these little yellow bikes were reduced to mere wreckage. It will take a long time for the city to process the undesired legacy of a broken ideal.

Living abroad involves a constant adaptation to the environment, requiring different ways to relate with it, striving to learn a language and, progressively, to assimilate the things one has left or lost on the road. Throughout this process one can reach some kind of truth or become disoriented.

The genesis of this project does not coincide with my arrival in Hong Kong in 2014, but with my move into the neighborhood of Mong Kok, three years later. At that time, my intention was to reconcile with a city from which I felt far away, unable to adapt to its fickle nature. I wasn’t yet aware that a large part of its essence is in the ephemeral, in what will eventually disappear, and that those who best capture that spirit are us – foreigners.

The photographer and her subjects take turns in projecting images of themselves onto each other, compressing their appearances and state of being at different points in time into one frame, and in turn bringing to light the unconscious stream of dialogue between them.

When I was small, I used to follow my parents around on my bicycle everyday, watching every sunset by the sea on Cheung Chau island, where I grew up. Those were some of my happiest memories, but as I took wings from my parents, they too faded away.

In 2017, my son was born. I started to look at things from a father’s point of view. I went back to where I grew up with my camera. What I saw was not just landscapes or places, but memories and stories of fatherhood, family and the land.