Kinetic City

Even as the ground shifts beneath our feet.

HK
2016—2017, 2024—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.

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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. Meanwhile, 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. I now notice my leg and shoulder are itchy. Something’s biting me as I sleep.

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. I can’t speed up this process, which is frustrating in one sense, but it’s a constant I live alongside, something I can focus on.

I’ve realised 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.

I find myself circling specific lines of thought. What’s involved in the act of looking? Is it possible to photograph Hong Kong not only to depict it, but 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? As theorist Ariella Azoulay notes, ‘The encounter with the photograph continues the event of photography that happened elsewhere.’¹

These questions provide a framework. A sandbox where photographic images become forms for interrogating ideas, notions, or arguments. An army of amalgamated pixels that needle and prod or, sometimes, just sit with ambiguity and discomfort. If there is a resolution to be found, I think it’s only that I’ve stayed with the questions long enough to let them 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.

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