Hong Kong Obscura
Hong Kong Obscura is my estranged reacquaintance with the city following a prolonged absence during the pandemic and weeks of forced confinement in quarantine on my return. Upon emerging from my hermetically sealed box, the city seemed strange, the familiar was now eerily unsettling and distant, the air tainted, hot, thick, and wet, not the cold, thin, scentless and anesthetized lungful’s I had become accustomed to. There was a distinct atmosphere of apprehension, as if a veil had been draped around me, my senses and sense of self in this place was no longer clear. I explored this phenomenon through a lens-less pinhole camera, no focus, no framing, listless and random, it parallels my murky, serpentine flow across this metropolis chimera, capturing this alienation and unease that enveloped me as I tried to find my way home.
The series uses an unconventional approach to image making and serves as both a coping mechanism as well as interpretative device to attempt to persevere under the enduring restrictions imposed in Hong Kong under the pandemic. The images reflect the unease, uncertainty, and lack of mediation that became a staple of daily life as the pandemic dragged on into its third year. The series simultaneously acts as a site of resistance to the proposed “new normal” the public was asked to adopt while also reminding us of the simple daily acts of social interaction, taken for granted, stripped away, again and again, to confront us with the significance of what we have lost.
This work was selected for exhibit in Urban Photo Awards 2022 in Italy.
“Hong Kong Obscura is an experimental photographic work that proposes interesting creative research on the representation of Kong Kong’s cityscape during the last stages of the COVID-19 pandemic period, specifically engaging with scenes that potentially depict the estrangement of the ‘New Normal’ life. Adopting a lens-less pinhole camera technique the work proposes the exploration of this estrangement since it draws the image to the limits of its allusive appearance and, in turn, it intentionally withdraws from the tradition of the Straight Photography that has predominated the twentieth-century Photography aesthetics, which often emphasizes focus, depth of field and image definition.
The precarious lens-less pinhole camera medium seems to render a Kafkaesque perception of reality, or even, enhances certain nightmarish ‘new normal’ absurdism, turning the image away from the pretentious transparency, commonly related to the objectivism of Documental Photography. In this sense, as proposed by the photographer’s research question statement, the work of Hong Kong Obscura unveils how an unconventional image-making technique represents sensory experiences and perceptions that can be interpreted as a form of resistance to the restrictions and confinement imposed during the pandemic.” -External Reviewer
