Two photographers over 渣甸山, Hong Kong, 2022

Photography has always felt like a compelling medium for expression, simultaneously as accessible through a phone in your everyday pocket but at the same time such an intentional and visceral artistic choice.

Walking through Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a special exhibit by Manisha Gera Baswani is particularly memorable in my reflections of the term. Her series of “Postcards from Home” display the shared, complex, and deeply entangled relationships from the history of partition, highlighting anecdotes of family separations through a series of postcards and photographs.

In itself, the photographs felt beautiful and evocative. What stood out most for me was the style and timing- individuals were often captured while in the steady rhythms of day-to-day life and the photographs did not feel contrived nor designed. This is heavy theorization on my end, but it feels like an artistic ethos that balanced motion and stillness, in a way that captured a reality of the world rather than what we desire it to be.

Inspired by this exhibition, I hope to capture the same momentary vignettes of Hong Kong using the same principle. Such photos are not pre-planned but captured as I walked around the city, hanging out with friends, and when life comes at you, taken with a phone and not retaken for particular aesthetic or design. As you’ll see this produces a coexistence of the beautiful yet deeply imperfect photographs, which in my opinion, balances that same movement and stillness, creating a more truthful depiction of life.

When I had the opportunity to go back to Hong Kong over winter in 2022 following the relaxation of quarantines, I’ve never felt such an oxymoronic and unexplainable phenomenon of both the familiar and unfamiliar. It is a difficult explanation of unease at the rhythms and norms of a place but yet a deep comfort of a childhood upbringing. What I do know is that I’ve found myself taking extra gazes and the towering malls in Causeway Bay, the old factory streets of Kwun Tong- an additional look, for both a city and a past self that now inhabits a now foreign space.

It has been three years since I have been back to Hong Kong, since then I’ve finished college, moved countries, started two jobs and now a graduate degree. Throughout it all, I felt myself grow ever distant from my hometown- feeling the gradual decline of my out-of-practice Cantonese, the language that I began to actualize the world with and the one that my parents fell in love with. This feeling of forgetfulness is no doubt common, of immigrants, international students and so many more – while I am not comparing their tribulations to mine, we all try and remind ourselves of our memories of home.

If the purpose of photography is to catalogue memory, I hope this series allows me to hold out to that outstretched hand of a former self and Hong Kong a little while longer.

Thank you for reading this project, it’s a real catharsis for me.

Matthew

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