Kinetic City
2016—2017, 2024—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W, Colour), Text
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 proceeds at its own pace, which is frustrating in one sense, but a constant that I live alongside. Like ironing, there’s a certain satisfaction buried within the process.
I think of this work as a kind of weather report, registering shifts in light, temperature, and movement across the unstable surface of Hong Kong as I encounter it. I’m interested in how these surfaces speak, how they hold traces of care, carelessness, attention, and time.
Theorist Ackbar Abbas describes a way of thinking about Hong Kong as a kind of dis-appearance, not a vanishing through absence, but through overexposure. In this view, the city becomes weighed down by cultural clichés and nostalgia, so much so that it struggles to emerge as something fully seen or understood. This déjà disparu—already lost—haunts the act of photographing Hong Kong.¹
What if each photograph is already mourning what it can’t quite hold?
Abbas’s 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. I want to see what they reflect back on the city, yes, but also on myself. Each act of looking becomes a kind of self-reckoning.
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 lapsed 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?
These questions don’t resolve; instead, 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.
Footnotes:
- 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.