Flatbed
How do repeated actions shape what we know?
HK
2019—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W), Text
Contact for use. Note: Some images on this page have been sliced. Alternative (alt) text is included in the first slice of each image.
001
The morning heat has already settled over Sham Shui Po, the air still thick with the smell of last night’s rain. Steam belches from an extraction vent, forcing the scent of hot oil into the street. Below, a man emerges from the Pei Ho Street wet market, pushing a flatbed trolley stacked with cardboard boxes.
002
003
At 1/640th of a second, the camera holds him in shadow, the trolley handle sharp in his grip. The technical choice reveals my position; I have time to consider shutter speeds, to frame the labour of others through an aesthetic lens. We’re both at work, but one is observational, the other embodied. The word covers both, but not the weight. That’s the asymmetry.
004
Something ghosts through me, shoulders rotating, weight shifting to my back foot. Fifteen years and 8,000 kilometres from a Melbourne office supply store, muscle memory fires. Two discs in my lower back never quite healed. The trolley summons recognition, but limited, partial; bound by my own encounter with this machinery. This man navigates his morning route with practised efficiency. His body carries knowledge I cannot access: which routes avoid crowds and direct sun, how to lean into the weight when the wheels stick on uneven pavement. The camera only captures gestures, not stories.
005
006
Walking has become my method. Hours dissolve this way. Humidity clings. Walking the street feels like wading through tepid water. Above, condensation drips from air conditioning units. You learn to read the footpath’s darker patches and thus sidestep an impromptu baptism. At the pedestrian crossing, exhaust from an idling bus mixes with the sweet rot from fruit stalls, that particular Hong Kong cocktail of productivity and decay.
007
008
Twice carried. (009)009
His shadow reads along. (011)
010
011
Handling what can’t be handled bare. (012)012
I cross arterial roads that carve the Kowloon Peninsula into neighbourhoods—Sham Shui Po into Cheung Sha Wan, Chuk Un into San Po Kong. In Kennedy Town, I notice crowds moving between streets and shopfronts, hemmed in by barriers and tri-lingual signs urging them not to disrupt the flow of traffic. They’re drawn by networks of content creators and followers whose presence is felt only on screens. I watch them, dressed for the feed, converging on the same nondescript street sign, drinking the same coffee from the same café. The location has become a backdrop because of how it looks online; digital visibility mapped onto analogue streets.
Industrial zones blend into residential and commercial blocks. Mixed-use buildings extend over pavements, their upper floors creating shelter, before tapering back at their tops like Tetris blocks. The city compresses at street level, expands vertically, and is contained at its edges by the ocean and the mountains that run from Hong Kong Island to Shenzhen.
On the overpass above Ching Cheung Road, I find a colony of macaques in a fruiting tree beside a Buddhist Association building. Below us, metal containers flow in tightly timed convoys. Above that industrial hum, time falters. We regard each other as two sets of displaced observers at the city’s margin. One macaque sits apart from the others, ignoring the traffic, watching something in the canopy with meditative stillness.
014
Different fabric, same garden. (015—016)015
016
Sometimes I stop photographing and stand still. The man pushing his trolley back in Sham Shui Po doesn’t look up at me or my camera. The work continues regardless of my attention. His morning has its own logic and necessities. The gulf between his labour and my looking feels absolute, and perhaps that’s what needs acknowledging, not connection but distance; the limits of what a photograph can hold.
017
Perforated boundary, work and light. (018)
018
What’s carried. (019—020)019
020
These nights, I fall asleep to the sound of rainfall or air-conditioner condensate. That ambient percussion of the subtropical city. When sleep won’t come, I listen deeper. Through the white noise emerge other rhythms: the clatter of metal collection twenty storeys below, the percussion of glass being sorted, buses releasing their pneumatic sighs as commuters disembark. The metallic processional of trolleys between the loading dock and the shop floor. These sounds mark the city’s third shift, the labour that prepares tomorrow’s ordinary.
021
Someone else’s gaze. (022)022
She carries her own atmosphere. (023)023
Come morning, I’ll walk again.
024