Kinetic City
2016—2017, 2024—2025
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W), Text
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I’m across the road from the Mongkok Police Station, nursing a cold espresso, watching time slip by. The weather’s tuned into its pre-summer station. Beyond my perch at the bar, crowds of botanical enthusiasts flock toward the Flower Market, and tourists snake along the adjoining shopfronts, waiting for a table to open up at the dim sum place next door. The poster in its window—Let’s Yum Cha!—provides a beacon of salvation in this parched corner of Mong Kok, where the asphalt and concrete conspire with the day’s heat to make things even hotter. The two rows of cyclone wiring atop the station’s wall glitter warmly in the sun. I now notice my leg and shoulder are itchy. Something’s biting me as I sleep.
Lately, I’ve left the camera at home. Instead, I read, write, archive, organise. I make connections between images taken years apart. It’s a process that suits me; I’m slow to realise things and ruminate often. The reflective nature of these activities reminds me of therapy. I think through the why of things and wrestle with concerns that could all too easily be left by the wayside. This method takes time and goes at its own pace. I can’t speed up this process, which is frustrating in one sense, but it’s a constant I live alongside, something I can focus on.
I think of this work as a kind of weather report—registering shifts in light, temperature, and movement. Hong Kong appears here not as a fixed place but as a fluctuating surface: scratched, reflected, overheated, refracted. I’m interested in how those surfaces speak—how they hold traces of care, carelessness, attention, and time. Drawing on theorist Ackbar Abbas’s work, I’m focused on the conditions of Hong Kong’s visibility—the way it flickers just before disappearing. Curator and theorist Ariella Azoulay reminds me that a photograph is never finished. Each image remains open, shaped by the encounter, and reshaped in each viewing. Maybe that’s why I keep circling these images, these streets. Not to explain them but to sit with them. I want to see what they reflect back on the city, yes, but also on myself.
I’ve realised that the question is more essential than the answer within my practice. Perhaps this is an aspect of my latent Catholicism, a spiritual concern that’s easy with questions and not always forthcoming with answers.
What’s involved in the act of looking? Is it possible to photograph Hong Kong in such a way as to think with it? What does it mean for my gaze to be non-local? Is a photograph ever not exploitative? What responsibilities do I have as the one holding the camera, and where do they end, if they end at all? As Azoulay notes:
The event of photography is subject to a unique form of temporality—it is made up of an infinite series of encounters... With the assistance of the spectator, the point of view under consideration here permits the event of photography to be preserved as one bearing the potential for permanent renewal that undermines any attempt to terminate it or to proclaim that it has reached its end.1
These questions provide a framework. A sandbox where photographic images serve as forms for exploring ideas, notions, or arguments. An army of amalgamated pixels that needle and prod or, sometimes, just sit with ambiguity and discomfort. If there is a resolution to be found, I think it’s only that I’ve stayed with the questions long enough to let them shape the work. Perhaps that’s enough for now. I’ll step back and let them breathe a bit.
Inhale for five.
Hold.
Then, exhale for seven.
Release.
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Footnote:
1 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination, A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2024), 32—33.