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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.

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.

The dream of Hong Kong people during the colonial time was said to be to get rich, move up the social ladder and become a member of the middle class. Since the 1990s, such a dream is said to be increasingly more difficult to achieve with Hong Kong becoming a Chinese city. More than 20 years after 1997, new and non-material expectations are added to the old bottle with the emerging younger generation. In my work, I attempt to document and re-present the souls and the spirit of the Hong Kong people amidst the recent worsening social instability and mounting conflicts.

Concerned with documenting post-colonial Hong Kong as it transitions to China’s ‘New Era’, this is an ongoing project, capturing everyday moments of a Hong Kong in flux.

Created over five years, since the onset of the Umbrella Movement, this collection of photographs represents Tsang’s unexpected personal mourning of the only place he has considered home.

The idea of presenting hundreds of photos in this exhibition is a meditation on excessiveness and displays Tsang’s obsession with capturing the impermanence of a city that is deteriorating. It can also be interpreted as a quandary into how he processes the encroaching absorption of his home city: the disappearing boundary between one country two systems.

Influenced by nostalgia and a desire for simplicity, Tsang has chosen to exclusively shoot with film.

In my ongoing photo and video essay “The Other Sky”, I am observing the contemporaneity around me – the effect of the flow of time on the present, and the dream (memory) of place within a post-truth world seemingly stretched out of linear space and time.

The still and moving images that make this investigation were shot mostly in Hong Kong and Shanghai, two closely linked metropolises that have undergone heavy changes. Space itself in these contemporary cities was, and is still, shrinking and expanding according to the needs and habits of its population that is also in constant flux. Does memory survive within a narrative perpetually rearranging itself?

With “The Other Sky”, I’m attempting to record and order impressions of collective memory.