• Art Home
• What's On
• Features
• 
• 
• Bookmark this site

Hong Kong isn’t known as a hotbed of photographic art, but that perception could be set to shift, writes Lara Day

Hong Kong is on e of the world’s most snap-happy cities: wander outside on any given day and chances are you’ll stumble across someone taking a picture, whether it’s with a state-ofthe- art camera phone, a hulking SLR, a pocket-sized point-and-shoot, or even a vintage Lomo or Leica. Indeed, there’s no shortage of photographic images here, not to mention new and secondhand photographic equipment for sale – but photographic art? Until recently, you’d have been hard pressed to know where to look for it.

No longer. Since May, Hong Kong has been home to the Ooi Botos Gallery, an art space with a startlingly clear focus: to show and promote cutting-edge lens-based art, and in so doing, teach the territory’s burgeoning art-going public a thing or two about just how artful a photograph can be. “Internationally photography has been accepted as an art form, but it’s still not completely accepted in Hong Kong,” says gallery co-founder Lisa Botos, whose expertise comes from ten years spent as picture editor for Time magazine’s Asian edition.

Both she and business partner Joanne Ooi, the creative director behind Shanghai Tang, are firm about their mission. “We want to explode people’s preconceived notions of what a photograph should constitute or whether a film can be considered art,” says Ooi. “We have no limitations as far as media. To be modern is not to be nostalgic, and neither of us are sentimental about traditionalism in either content or technique.”

You just need to step through the gallery’s red fiberglass doors on Gresson Street to see what Ooi means. Ooi Botos’s opening exhibition, Dreams, features Chinese artist Liu Ren, and art duo Chen Zhuo and Huang Keyi, whose images are a far cry from what you’d find in your average photo album. Instead, they present elaborate digitally manipulated dreamscapes and carnival scenes, blending aspects of fantasy and reality into complex, multilayered illusions that, in some cases, took two months to create.

While Ooi-Botos has its sights on becoming a leading light in photography, it is by no means a solitary beacon. Other venues that incorporate contemporary photography into their exhibition programmes include Para/Site, Osage, 10 Chancery Lane, Art Statements and Hanart TZ. Still, none have taken up the mantle laid down by the OP Gallery in the ’90s – the exhibition space on Prince’s Terrace in Mid-Levels was the first in the territory to show only photographic works. Run by photography luminary Lee Ka-sing, OP saw its heyday in the lead-up to the Handover, which coincided with a flourishing in Hong Kong photography as image-makers sought to capture a period they knew would imminently be lost.

Although OP closed down when Lee relocated himself and the gallery to Canada, local photography has continued to develop, albeit with a lower profile. “Photography has been one area where Hong Kong is strong,” says art historian and photographer David Clarke, who heads the Department of Fine Art at the University of Hong Kong. “For the same reason that photography came into its own towards the Handover, these last couple of years have been strong, too.”

Para/Site director Tobias Berger, who will be curating Germany’s Mannheim- Ludwigshafen- Heidelberg Fotofestival later this year, attributes part of this strength to photographers’ versatility. “A lot of good photographers here play with different media,” he says. “There’s some interesting crosspollination.”

You can see this in action in the Para/Site-produced portfolio, Hong Kong Flat, which shows 15 contemporary photographs by artists as diverse as Hiram To, Tozer Pak and Leung Chi-wo. These artists experiment with installation, performance and sculpture respectively, and their photographs are always relative, whether to their own work, or to the context in which they are displayed – for instance, enlarged prints of Leung’s images are currently being displayed facing video works,which flicker, chatter and bleep as you navigate through the exhibition.

Cross-pollination seems to take place not just within art, but life. Some of Hong Kong’s most well-known contemporary art photographers have thrived in their commercial endeavors – take Wing Shya, now represented by Ooi Botos, who built his reputation in fashion and film work, or So Hing-keung, who daylights as an architect. For some photographers, though, it’s a struggle to balance financial imperatives with artistic pursuits. Keith Chan, a recent graduate in photography from University of the Arts London, whose work was shown last year at the Royal Academy in London’s Summer Exhibition, would love to work full-time on his art but has to take on freelance work to support it.

Of course, not all photographers situate themselves in the domain of art. Hong Kong is home to a wealth of committed documentary photographers whose work has been under-represented since the mid-’90s, despite the genre’s prevalence at the Heritage Museum. Simon Go, whose photo book Hong Kong Old Shops was partly funded by the Arts Development Council, says documentary photographers are suffering from a lack of exposure and critical dialogue.

“We need a triangle of photographers, galleries and curators, and art critics,” says Go. “Here we only have photographers, no platforms and few art critics.” Dustin Shum, whose documentary and conceptual pictures of China’s public parks, agrees, choosing to write about photography and visual culture (in Chinese) because “if there’s no criticism there’s no progress.”

Still, there are some signs of headway. While most current photography magazines resemble equipment catalogues more than art portfolios, last year, a quarterly art-photography magazine called pH-i was launched by Almond Chu and photography group pH5. What’s more, galleries seem to be beginning to take more risks in terms of photographic offerings – Art Statements’ upcoming Postcapitalism Kidnapping show between French photographer Frank Perrin and graffiti artist ZEVS is one example, while the newly opened Contemporary by Angela Li launched with a show by Chen Jiagang, a contemporary Chinese artist who happens to be a photographer.

It’s also heartening to take note of the next exhibition lined up at Ooi Botos; July will see the first solo show of Wei Leng Tay, a Hong Kong photographer originally from Singapore who captures intimate psychological portraits of people in their living spaces. When asked about the gallery’s choice to showcase a local artist, Botos’s answer is simple: “What interests me is really interesting artists, and they can be from anywhere in the world. It just so happens that there are some people like Wei Leng who really interest me.”