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“Two Views”, Cella+Knoll, c-prints, diptychs, Hong Kong, 120x48”, 11 images, 2008.
”Floating World Projects” catalog

REFLECTING on Deng Xiaoping’s dictum of “One Country - Two Systems” this project, looks at the parallel existences of those living in a peri- and post-industrialized society concurrently. Our attention is on the most probable evanescence of traditional Chinese ways of existence which yet persists. The tiny ventures which spring up like weeds on the sidewalks and between the towers of Hong Kong, usurping positions despite the colonization by the British, the hand over to Beijing and global corporations which render both the latter moot. 

Stacked up along roads of stairs impassable by vehicles, under the “travelator” which splices through the city, under the nose of chichi galleries, in the driveways of towers closed on Sundays, stalls, services, and social events proliferate and relocate on a moment’s notice which usually begins with a chorus of jack hammers or a truck full of bamboo which will become scaffolding by the end of the day. 

Hong Kong is a vertically layered culture in which the trajectories of the inhabitants exist in parallel and rarely intersect, all in motion, rootless and fleeting. Laowai (outsider) investors here to profit from the remainders of the special zone and construction workers cross paths in a steamy, smelly, cacophonous clutter, riot of color and precarious piles all under the sometimes watchful, sometimes blind eye of the new government which doesn’t concern itself with the teetering sheds, electrical feats of snarled wires and missing permits, hundreds of domestics picnicking and playing cards in the corporate catwalks which connect the sealed towers of home and office for the corporate climbers, as these all too tangible tangles will unravel as the next tower shoots up.

Through the inevitable two views created by the necessity of stacking two images in order to contain the top and bottom of a truly vertical city, these images attempt to share the temporal qualities of the city as the light and weather shifts from top to bottom in a minute and captures what you might or might not see beyond the framed scape depending on which way we shift the camera. The objects in the images align intermittently, evoking hit or miss moments of the streams. But with any form of documentation, that which is in motion does not remain. What remains are the records of the artifacts which will last a little longer than the rest. These images are literally on a human scale making it impossible to view top and bottom simultaneously unless the viewer distances himself as in a tower thereby missing the details, odors and sounds of everyday China. These photographic images are our way of celebrating the teeming, vital swarm and throng of Chinese culture we are enjoying at the moment.