Hong Kong Colours

(2020)


Over the summer, I felt an urge to do a series about Hong Kong. Many people say we are losing the spirit of Hong Kong and it will inevitably disappear before 2047. But what are we losing, exactly? How do you characterise a monolithic Hong Kong for 7.5 million residents? Describing Hong Kong has never been easy for me, probably because I’m from this very place. 


Yet there’s a discrepancy between how Hong Kong is portrayed on the global stage and what Hong Kong actually is like. There are thousands of Instagrammable street shots of the city: dim sum, Victoria Peak, the skyline, and neon lights. In the past year, Hong Kong has become equivalent to photos of the protests, which is a part of the city's trajectory, but should not define the city. 


This series is an attempt at capturing the coexistence of all the contradictions I see in Hong Kong through colors. 


Colours have become controversial in the past year and a half in Hong Kong. We started to judge along the lines of yellow and blue, black and white. They are important points of reference. But there are also other telling colours in the city’s palette, like the vital and voracious red in temples and Teslas, the cautious yet rebellious yellow in “Wet Floor” signs everywhere and “Shrilling Chicken” toys used in protests, the stable blue in humble tarp, and the green that finds its way from the city’s accessible nature to the construction sites in Central.


HKSAR was established with the precondition of “50 years no change”, which was a kind of oxymoron. How could anyone stay the same for half a century? Hong Kong will continue to change, for better or worse. This series is only a snapshot of the HK I saw under the relentless August sun, in the first summer in years when I saw more blue skies than smog.

Hong Kong Colours

(2020)


Over the summer, I felt an urge to do a series about Hong Kong. Many people say we are losing the spirit of Hong Kong and it will inevitably disappear before 2047. But what are we losing, exactly? How do you characterise a monolithic Hong Kong for 7.5 million residents? Describing Hong Kong has never been easy for me, probably because I’m from this very place. 


Yet there’s a discrepancy between how Hong Kong is portrayed on the global stage and what Hong Kong actually is like. There are thousands of Instagrammable street shots of the city: dim sum, Victoria Peak, the skyline, and neon lights. In the past year, Hong Kong has become equivalent to photos of the protests, which is a part of the city's trajectory, but should not define the city. 


This series is an attempt at capturing the coexistence of all the contradictions I see in Hong Kong through colors. 


Colours have become controversial in the past year and a half in Hong Kong. We started to judge along the lines of yellow and blue, black and white. They are important points of reference. But there are also other telling colours in the city’s palette, like the vital and voracious red in temples and Teslas, the cautious yet rebellious yellow in “Wet Floor” signs everywhere and “Shrilling Chicken” toys used in protests, the stable blue in humble tarp, and the green that finds its way from the city’s accessible nature to the construction sites in Central.


HKSAR was established with the precondition of “50 years no change”, which was a kind of oxymoron. How could anyone stay the same for half a century? Hong Kong will continue to change, for better or worse. This series is only a snapshot of the HK I saw under the relentless August sun, in the first summer in years when I saw more blue skies than smog.

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