Kinetic City
2016—2017, 2024—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W), Text
I’m across the road from the Mongkok Police Station, nursing a cold espresso, watching time slip by. The weather’s tuned into its pre-summer station. Beyond my perch at the bar, crowds of botanical enthusiasts flock toward the Flower Market, and tourists snake along the adjoining shopfronts, waiting for a table to open up at the dim sum place next door. The poster in its window—Let’s Yum Cha!—provides a beacon of salvation in this parched corner of Mong Kok, where the asphalt and concrete conspire with the day’s heat to make things even hotter. The two rows of cyclone wiring atop the station’s wall glitter warmly in the sun.
Lately, I’ve left the camera at home. Instead, I read, write, archive, organise. I make connections between images taken years apart. It’s a process that suits me; I’m slow to realise things and ruminate often. The reflective nature of these activities reminds me of therapy. I think through the why of things and wrestle with concerns that could all too easily be left by the wayside. This method takes time and goes at its own pace, which is frustrating in one sense, but a constant that I live alongside.
I think of this work as a kind of weather report, registering shifts in light, temperature, and movement. Hong Kong appears here not as a fixed place but as a fluctuating surface: scratched, reflected, overheated, refracted. I’m interested in how those surfaces speak—how they hold traces of care, carelessness, attention, and time. There’s a line of thinking I return to often, from the writer Ackbar Abbas, who once described Hong Kong’s presence as something that flickers just before disappearing.¹ His idea of disappearance doesn’t signify absence, but a precarious kind of presence that emerges in moments of crisis.
This sensitivity to time and appearance echoes in curator and theorist Ariella Azoulay’s reminder that a photograph is never finished. Each image remains open, shaped by the encounter, and reshaped in each viewing.² Maybe that’s why I keep circling these images, these streets. Not to explain them but to sit with them. I want to see what they reflect back on the city, yes, but also on myself. After all, we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. That idea, often attributed to Anaïs Nin, feels especially true here. Each act of looking becomes a kind of self-reckoning. Each photograph, in its way, holds a trace of the person who made it—what they noticed, what they missed, what they brought to that moment of seeing.
In sitting with these images and allowing them to reflect something back to me, I’ve come to realise that the question is more essential than the answer within my practice. Perhaps this is an aspect of my latent Catholicism, a spiritual concern that’s easy with questions and not always forthcoming with answers.
What’s involved in the act of looking? Is it possible to photograph Hong Kong in such a way as to think with it? What does it mean for my gaze to be non-local? Is a photograph ever not exploitative? What responsibilities do I have as the one holding the camera, and where do they end, if they end at all?
Azoulay writes that photographs are never truly finished—that they unfold across time, shaped by each new encounter.³ It’s with that same mindset that I arrange and organise these images, not to look for resolution but to remain open to what they might offer next, even now.
The images serve as forms for thinking: amalgamated pixels that needle and prod or, at times, simply sit with ambiguity. If there’s any resolution, it’s only that I’ve stayed with the asking long enough to let it shape the work. Perhaps that’s enough for now. I’ll step back and let them breathe a bit.
Inhale for five.
Hold.
Then, exhale for seven.
Release.
- Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 25.
- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination, A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2024), 31.
- Ibid., 32—33.