Visual Arts

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.