Tracking HK Visual Traits! (Part 2)

#24 Photobook Club Session by Phoboko

The world is increasingly constituted through visual mediation nowadays. Meaning, is generated overwhelmingly through the circulation and exchange of visual images and icons, in relationship to culture, politics, data, information, identity, or emotion etc. So how do we read visual codes? And how do we make meaning from visuals?

To dive deeper and talk about HK visual traits through photobooks, we felt the first step was to have a common language or structure to talk about it. Similarly to language systems, the representation system used in photography also involves rules and conventions, known as visual semiotics.

In signs, there are the signifiers and the signified. Visuals and photographs are signifiers. They are physical forms of communicating a particular sign or meaning. ‘Signified’ refers to the meanings or thoughts that a photograph expresses. The signified can be interpreted through reading physical objects from an image e.g. there are blocks of buildings with washed-out paints. This is known as denotation. Yet most of the time, the signified is interpreted connotatively. This means that we make meaning from an image via experiences, ideologies, and expectations we have e.g. the blocks relate to the grassroots community in Hong Kong. It reminds me of how we used to go to Tze Wan Shan every year to visit my uncle and my grandmother. It also led me to think about the housing structure and policies back in the 80s when HK was still governed by the UK. I expect to see elderly gathering around to play chess, and people with their frugal lifestyle and outfits.

For signifiers, Peirce categorise them into 3 types – icon, symbol and index. To put it in relation to photography, an icon is when the photograph has a physical resemblance to the signified. We know how to read these images because they clearly resemble what they are representing e.g. a picture of a rose is an icon of a rose. Most of the time, photographs are icons of actual objects we see. Symbolic signs, on the other hand, have no obvious nor natural relationship to their objects. The relationship is learnt culturally e.g. a rose is a symbolism of romantic love. However, in this case, the rose is almost universally known for its symbolism of romantic love. So depending on the context in which the image is presented e.g. museum / gallery / magazine and the kind of viewers who interpret it, the rose can be an iconic as well as a symbolic sign of romantic love. Lastly, indexical signs have an “existential” relationship to their objects. This means that they have coexisted in the same place at some time. Photographs are indexical signs that testify to the moment that the camera was in the presence of its subject. At least up until before AI photography and CG imaging, photographs are indexical in that it represents a trace of the real.

With these terminologies in mind, we confronted four generic styles of photobooks from Hong Kong that surfaced during session #23: black & white documentary, pop culture representations, the young or contemporary, and typological presentation. We were split into small groups to assess such recurring themes.

1 – black and white documentary – Blues by Alfred Ko

Blues by Alfred Ko is a photobook made in the 90s that talks about Hong Kong colonialism before the handover in 1997. At the back of the book the artist quoted, “my images represent a state of mind, an extraordinary state of mind prevalent before the founding of S.A.R.”. The book is chronologically arranged from 1989 up til July 1st 1997, the day of the handover. Throughout the book there are repeated gloomy skies and recurring icons of the status of the Queen. There is an image of people holding candles at Victoria Park, several images of airplanes against HK cityscapes and repeated images of banners with slogans that say “democracy”. They all symbolise the idea of “freedom” which was circulating in the city. In one of the images taken in 1993, 5 years before the handover, we see the back of a middle-aged man holding his left fist tight with visible veins while overlooking the harbour at a reclamation in Yaumatei. On the opposite side of the harbour parks many barges and cargo boats. It should be the view of Stonecutters Island, which was connected to the Kowloon peninsula by the West Kowloon Reclamation in the 1990s to provide land for the construction of the road and railway network to the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok. His gesture reveals a kind of tension, symbolising the anxiety that people have with what is to come in the future. Overall, the black and white documentary images throughout the photobook generate a mood of tension and uncertainty. Perhaps it is this atmosphere and feeling that reflects a type of Hong Kong trait from a particular era.

2 – pop culture representation – The Dayspring of Eternity by Lau Chi Chung

The Dayspring of Eternity by Lau Chi Chung, on the other hand, was produced recently. It talks about the artist’s state of mind, or a representation of a state of mind, on Hong Kong colonialism as well but 25 years after the handover in 1997. The artist used a lot of found images from old newspapers, advertisements and tickets across the photobook. He also used a lot of text to narrate his nostalgic feeling towards the period of Hong Kong when it was colonised by the UK. The front cover image is an image of the sea with a purply hue and a lens flare. Some identified it immediately with Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. As D puts it, “the varying colour reflections in this image is very Hong Kong. I have only seen it here.” Others have more of a consensus feeling towards its sign of signifying dreaminess. As we went through the book, B picked up that the word 「香港」is prevalent throughout the book as well as the “Hong Kong font”「真體字」. Whether it is represented as a lightbox icon on an image or used as the text font throughout the book, there is no doubt that this is one of the iconic traits of Hong Kong.

3 – the young or contemporary – Teleportation by Lai Long Hin

Teleportation is a photobook created by a Hong Kong contemporary artist, Lai Long Hin. The photobook is a vast collection of snapshot pixelated images from his mobile phone photography. The work is split into 17 chapters. Each chapter consists of an array of images. Each image can relate to either one or the other or both adjectives from its title e.g. Treatment or Healing, Hiding or Invisible. The artist often zooms in as much as possible using his camera phone to focus on people and objects, excluding all unnecessary detail and clutter from his images. Hence, it is difficult to depict them connotatively as single images. Even when looking at them as a set of images from a chapter, they inspire questions rather than provide signs for readers to associate meanings to them.

In particular, I like Chapter 8: Still or Frozen. The first image is a girl frozen in her posture, leaning her right side against the wall while the boy leans forward. Next page on the left is an image of a few Guanyin statues. They are in crossed-leg positions and are floating on the wall. As I flip through to read this chapter, I began to question whether the images relate more to Stillness or Frozen. Other ambiguous images from this chapter such as, an image of a girl hanging upside down on a swing as if she was unconscious; an image of a pile of sand against a concrete wall; an image of many empty Bonaqua bottles uniformly standing on the floor. Towards the end of the chapter there is also an interesting diptych image. One is a close up of a man sleeping against a red pole, the other is an image of a lady with a similar facial expression but looking blank.

The joy in reading this photobook is in the details of the day-to-day that the artist directs us to see. How do we look for symbolism of Hong Kong traits from this work? Perhaps there are no commonly-known or easily identifiable signs such as Hong Kong font or people holding candles at Victoria Park. Instead, we make-meaning and associate the work to Hong Kong from the combination of the 500 pages thick photobook of images of gestures, objects, architectures and people.

4 – typological presentation – BLOCKS by Dustin Shum

BLOCKS by Dustin Shum is a photobook about the Hong Kong public housing estates. Found in the artist statement of this work, he mentioned that, “according to the 2010 statistics of the Hong Kong Housing Society, thirty percent of the territory’s population lives in public housing… public housing has come to represent typical living spaces in Hong Kong.” The photobook contains portraits of these public housing estates, almost all of them documented in isolation from people. Images are of architectural designs, exteriors and interiors of public housing communal spaces, wall graffitis, and traces of decays as well as renovations. There are a few set of images that display the before and after of the exact same location. For example, there is an image of On Yat House, Shun On Estate with handwritten notes on the exterior wall. The page after is an image of the exact same location yet taken a year and four months after. The image shows that the exterior wall is newly painted in a gradient of blue. The blocks on the sides are no longer dull in colour but in sharp yellow.

Although the work is very personal to the artist Dustin as he grew up in one of these public housing estates for 30 years, images from BLOCKS definitely have strong indications of Hong Kong traits to Hong Kong readers. Public housing estates often symbolise the low-income, ageing, and backward community that relies on social securities. They are also important monuments of the Hong Kong Government’s social policies during post-war years, as the dense multi-storey design was able to accommodate waves of immigrants from the Mainland effectively. Even without such cultural knowledge of Hong Kong, the lego-looking multi-storey design of these blocks are iconic to the city Hong Kong that can also be found in postcards, magazines and publications.

After a long and deep look into these four photobooks from Hong Kong, how do we make meaning about Hong Kong through the images in these photobooks? Are there patterns that emerge and is there a Hong Kong visual language? Is it important to recognise it and if so, archive it? Perhaps it is too early to say as we only really unfolded one small layer of this huge topic. What’s next might be to look into the history of Hong Kong photobooks and the existing archive of it from varying sources.

On interracial families and identity formation

A review on the exhibition: m<other> by Kim Jee-Yun

While the research on ‘tracking Hong Kong visual traits’ is still on-going, I came across this exhibition m<other> by a Korean artist Kim Jee-Yun. The work on interracial families and the question on ethnic identity formation for the offsprings felt somewhat related to the fate and background of Hong Kong, a city of an intersection between the West and the East.

As I walked into Soluna Fine Art Gallery located in Sai Street, Sheung Wan, on the right there was a family portrait of Alia Eryes, the current CEO of Mother’s Choice, and her mother. And to the left by the stairs, it was the artist statement written by Dr. Vicky Lee, who wrote a book on Being Euasian: Memories Across Racial Divides. The tone sets in to focusing on mothers and femininity immediately, mirroring the theme of the exhibition. What drew my attention was the book shelf beside the artist statement. There were two archival images of Euasian family portraits in Hong Kong taken in 1900 and 1924 alongside Dr. Lee’s book. It gave me more context into thinking about the history of Eurasian community and how it all began in Hong Kong.

© Michelle Chan @ Soluna Fine Art Gallery

Little Edith Eaton says to herself, ‘Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? … I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.’

(Sui Sin Far [Edith Eaton] , ‘Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian’, 222) – Extracted from Chapter 2 of the book ‘Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides’. https://hkupress.hku.hk/image/catalog/pdf-preview/9789622096714.pdf

From the artist statement, it felt that the artist was more interested in the mothers, and their visibility and presence needed to be acknowledged more so than the fathers within the interracial families. I wondered, why not the fathers? Lee wrote in her book that, “Any European employee who violated the colonial etiquette by interracial romance was jeopardizing not only his career but was also risking ostracism…Kenneth Andrew recalled that the first document he had to sign was a promise not to marry a Chinese female (Langford, 1998)”. It feels as though the hostility of interracial marriage is mutual between mothers and fathers, so I wonder whether there was something else that the artist felt with mothers that needed to be acknowledged.

Looking at the images, the images of the mothers and their child often took place on the bed, or sofa or a corner of their home. Lying down, sitting or standing, they were stoic with seriousness or slight grin on their faces. Perhaps it carried on from the idea of traditional painting where wider smiles were “associated with madness, lewdness, loudness, drunkenness, all sorts of states of being that were not particularly decorous”. Or perhaps the artist wanted the images to represent power and seriousness of these interracial families. Serendipitously, I met the artist on the day of visit. She told me her photographic process, “I asked them to find a place that is comfortable. For example, for a baby it would make sense to have the 2 hours photography session on the bed. I asked them not to smile, because this is documentary photography. During the shooting, I show them the photographs I took. The camera is a mirror to show them how they want to be represented. They changed their pose to adopt to that and we agree together on the final image.” The work became interesting in that it is a collaboration with the interracial families in creating a pictorial representation of how they want to be seen. And then what fascinates me is when the family being photographed have the power to control how they are being represented in images, their choices of poses can also infer how they want others to see them. The power of their presence becomes not only being who they are in front of the camera, but also how they want to be seen by others.  

From the clothing that the mothers wore, the objects, and surrounding environment in these portraits, all the works presented in this exhibition reflected social-economic privilege in the interracial families photographed. The artist mentioned to me that the choice of families are those amongst her network – friends, neighbours. Slowly she advertised on social media recruiting mix-raced families who want to be photographed. How is her method of selecting families to photograph affect the way audience understand and learn about the psychological and emotional depth of interracial families in Hong Kong?  Perhaps this is something to explore further too.

© Michelle Chan @ Soluna Fine Art Gallery

Amongst the photographs, one photograph of an Indonesian mother with her baby boy drew my attention. According to the gallerist, she was often mis-represented as the domestic helper. I wonder how her interracial marriage experience is in comparison with the others, especially in relation to the culture of this city Hong Kong. It was a shame that the exhibition only presented the images of family portraits. I felt the exhibition would have been more enriching if sound recordings of interviews about the families’ experiences of interraciality were included. I felt this would have given more layers to the body of work and to the theme that the artist wanted the viewers to ponder upon.

Evidence – Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel

Larry Sultan, famously known for his work Picture from Home, which documents the lives of his home with parents in Southern California with contemporary photography, film stills, fragments of conversations and his own writings and other memorabilia, collaborated with Mike Mandel for a work less well-known Evidence, a brilliant recent discovery while reading the book Photography and Collaboration by Daniel Palmer.

Between 1975-1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel worked together and curated selected photographs from a multitude of images that previously existed solely within the boundaries of the industrial, scientific, governmental and other institutional sources. The work Evidence is about juxtaposing these previously contextualised images into new forms of narratives which some become humorous and while others perplexing. The work demonstrate that the meaning of a photograph is conditioned by the context and sequence in which it is seen, and by isolating from their original context that these images take on meanings that address the confluence of industry and corporate mischief, ingenuity and pseudo-science.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

© Larry Sultan, from the series ‘Evidence’; Source @ Larry Sultan

One needs to read the book to fully absorb and comprehend what they set out to do (And I wish I have the book to read it closely too!). The absurdity of these pairings somehow has a common thread that holds the whole book, transporting you to a universe that you may be familiar with yet completely off in some way – suggesting that we often read images in a contextualised form and when that’s been removed, what seems familiar becomes floating in a space that is waiting for us to make meaning of. When there’s a series of these and are carefully curated and sequenced, our brain has its way to fill in those blanks and create new forms of narrative. Evidently these are images of evidence, of truths, of events, of history… somehow in Evidence the value of these images changed and became fictional.

Two People – Sean Lee

Photography can of course be about documenting what’s in front of us, the pslit moment that happened right in front of our eyes, but it can also serve as a medium to create spaces for conversations, for connections for intimacy.

Two people is an ongoing body of photographic work by Singapore photographer Sean Lee as part of his artistic oeuvre exploring the theme of family and kinship in an Asian context. Lee used photography as a device for breaking the silence in understanding his family better. The number ‘two’ is of particular significance to him as it represents a symbiotic partnership bound by love but also fraught with tension.

© Sean Lee, from the series ‘Two People’; Source @ Landscape Stories

In an interview with Landscape Stories magazine, he described “I have been routinely choreographing performances and situations between my father, my mother, and me, since 2010. I used to think I knew what I was doing with the making of these images, but as time passed I became less certain. At times they seem to speak to me about the dreams and nightmares of childhood. Most of the time, however, they make me wonder about the strangeness of being a human organism and the mystery of being a family, of being a part of a lineage. I continue to photograph my parents because they are the only people who occur to me without my own choosing.”

The work focuses on the relationship between his parents to explore larger themes of love, tension, interdependency and sacrifice. Tentative and moving, these gentle frames of domestic life beckon at us to slow down and contemplate upon the concept of family and ephemeral nature of existence.

Mundane – Salma Abedin Prithi

Bangladesh artist, Salma Abedin Prithi, looks into the gruesome and dehumanising social violence that occurs on the everyday newspaper such as a man is beaten by his neighbours after complaining their music is too loud. A mother is murdered by a local mob suspecting her of kidnapping while she visits a school to inquire about admissions. A child is lynched by thirteen men after being accused of stealing a bicycle.

She stages these stories with her friends and family to reconstruct the psychological experience there was with beautiful harsh black and white staged images. The performative space created between the artist and the actor/ress allows improvisation to push further the participatory act of the actor’s interpretation of the story which are captured and emotionally felt by audience when looking through the images.

• 

© Salma Abedin Prithi, from the series ‘Mundane’; Source @ Salma Abedin Prithi

In an interview with Lensculture, she described, “The performances in my photographs were quite organic as I did not arrange any rehearsal, script, storyboard, or any other illustration. I need an intimate environment, and preferably accidental moments, to explore the unexpected, which often works better than a planned approach.”

© Salma Abedin Prithi, from the series ‘Mundane’; Source @ Salma Abedin Prithi

Prithi has created a body of work made up of nearly fifty images, split into two distinct streams that work in conversation with one another. Black and white photographs, harshly lit and capriciously surreal are paired with waxed photographs extracted from newspapers, collaged with textual erasures, sourced from the same. She explained that, “many of my photos are taken inside the same room, as these real events were connected to a common place and its morphology. Secondly, I tried to transform real newspaper photos and texts to an ambiguous poetry on such violence, to protest against the mundanity of everyday news.” 

Drawing the Event – Hirofumi Isoya

Another Japanese Artist, Hirofumi Isoya, who was one of the finalist at The Reference Asia shared his series Drawing the Event where he re-examines the consistency in recognition and the linear temporal axis through creating works. Most of the subject matters are familiar in our daily lives and how he manages to capture and record these fragments of life moments is what intrigue me the most with this series.

© Hirofumi Isoya, from the series ‘Drawing the Event’; Source @ The Reference Asia
Coins from the great powers are pressed against a palm as intensely as it becomes congested. The five rings are naturally reminiscent of the Olympic Games. This work, however, clearly presents the more essential subject that money is more stiff and tougher.

• 

• 

Left: Expression and Metabolism(*02) is myself covering my chin with the t-shirt that I was wearing one day, creating the odd scene of my grown beard poking out of the t-shirt. There is the layer of a white cloth in between those of my chin and beard. What I found through several attempts was timing was very important for this work. My beard wouldn’t poke through the layer of the t-shirt if it was a half day earlier or later.

Right: Answer(*04) is another work from the series, which has a more personal narrative behind it. I photographed this work while arguing with my partner back then at a hotel in Germany. While having the long argument, I unconsciously kept chewing a straw sticking in a Starbucks cup. When I put the cup in front of a dresser, the deformed straw was reflected in the mirror as though two straws were facing each other. This scene was projecting the circumstance we were in and some symmetry that we had. 

These works mostly capture details of subjects, and reflect scenes and sensations that his body catches before he comprehend the whole circumstances. 

The colour of the images are decreased to sepia tone while one side of the frame remains a colour of the original photo. In the interview with The Reference Asia, he mentioned, “While a frame is generally considered as an additional matter to a photographic work, I rather consider my work has an image stuck on a frame which is a sculptural object. I aim to present multiple relationships including the presentness of the colored frame, the spared space between the photograph and the frame created by the process of manipulation, and the viewers’ thinking and disturbances about the outside of the frame which you pointed out.”

2:16.22 – Kensaku Seki

Japanese artist Kensaku Seki (with a background in physical education and himself also as an athlete) recently made a work 2:16.22 which looks at five athletes who stake their lives on the act of running and the on-going fight to set records. The work looks at the other side of glory in setting the record numbers – the sweat, the pain, the endurance etc came together for an artist book as well as an exhibition that is currently showing at Reminder Strongholds.

I really enjoyed the work perhaps because I was also a former swimmer and I resonate with the hardship behind the glorification.

Constanza Valderrama

Recent graduate, Constanza Valderrama is a Chilean artist based in London. Her artistic practice involves exploring photography medium as an object, experimenting and using a multiplicity of materials and techniques to create and print her images.

Her graduation pieces include a series called Horizon Tautology, which is a collection of eight photographic pieces of the same image done with a multiplicity of materials and techniques. The image is a landscape that represents the place where her parents grew up and where they still live. This landscape has also been the background for lots of her memories.

Whereas the repetition of the same image speaks of the recurring act of remembering this place, the different plastic solutions translate autobiographic situations, emotions and sensations that have shaped this memory over time.

This collection is visually linked by the horizon line, articulating a final organic composition containing a multiplicity of shapes, textures, colours and thickness. Altogether, these ten pieces suggest that particular ways of remembering form the general puzzle of memory.

© Constanza Valderrama, from the series ‘Horizon Tautology’; Source @ RCA

Finger Play – Jinhee Kim

Awarded excellent for The Reference Asia photo prize, Korean artist Jinhee Kim‘s Finger Play series explores her own relationships with others and society using her distinctive technique of finely embroidering photographs.

© Jinhee Kim, from the series ‘Finger Play’; Source @ The Reference Asia

In the interview by The Reference Asia, the project birthed as a result of her body reaction to embroidering. She discovered she developed pompholyx, which caused blisters on her hands and feet. The blisters that she repeatedly got made her quite embarrassed and began thinking about contexts of the hand, which is one of the body parts most exposed to others, in a personal level and a social level.

“I started wondering why my rough hands embarrassed me. That made me start collecting images of hands generally considered ideal, which I saw on media…

…media instill stereotypes in people. Advertisements and magazines put emphasis on creating an image that resonates with a large audience. Especially, advertising images are both what a common recognition within a group creates, and what the recognition is created based on…

…while these images are unnaturally exaggerated, no one would think they are further from everyday life. They imprint the impression that these are the feminine, clean, beautiful hands in the audience’s mind.”

Other than adopting the traditional form of embroidery photographs by using found images of “ideal” female hands from media and advertisement, she developed the work further by photographing female hands sticking out of holes on printed materials and playing with the threads.

One of the jurors Gwen Lee commented, “Jinhee’s works Finger Play conjured up images of Dutch painter Juan Sanchez Cotan’s still life paintings. Instead of cabbage and apples, we see anonymous hands entering into panel of images (realities), connected by threads into subliminal realities. The illusion created through the layer of printed images (cut out images of hands from the magazine), embroidery, and hands hold an aura that is both eternal or disturbing.”

 

Covid-19

Artworks and photography work about the pandemic has been flooding the social media or amongst the art fields, none of which gives me a new sense of inspiration like the one I find with Antoine d’Agata. He used a thermal imaging camera and is drawn to it as it reduces the human subjects in his images to a heat source, an essence of humanity, stripped of cultural specificity.

The artwork themselves are very captivating. And the use of this technology makes perfect sense for capturing humanity in this cold war.

Reference: https://www.magnumphotos.com/newsroom/im-starting-to-feel-the-pain-antoine-agata-covid-19-coronavirus/?utm_source=Audience&utm_campaign=147805841a-FIELD_NOTES_2306_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_237144cbf5-147805841a-7253576&mc_cid=147805841a&mc_eid=ee72b89131

© Antoine d’Agata, from the article ‘I’m Starting to Feel the Pain’; Source @ Magnum Photos