'Hong Kong Today' is a group exhibition featuring promising and emerging photographers Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, Kwan Kam Cheong and Nick Poon. All three artists have scanned Hong Kong’s intriguing cityscape, albeit each with a very different outcome. Titled as 'Hong Kong Today', this exhibition reveals obscure and unseen sides of Hong Kong, and expresses both the charm and gloom of this metropolitan city.
Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze has gained world-wide recognition with his work Vertical Horizon in 2012. Originally from France, he was stunned by Hong Kong’s architectural complexity. Compared to many low rise places in Europe, Hong Kong has an intense 3-D structure. Business and residential places are so fiercely built on top of each other, each lift in fact would deserve its own street-name. Romain points at this unique phenomenon by shooting urban sceneries bottom up. In his latest series Wild Concrete, he focuses on nature sprouting from the most incongruous places of our dense urban environment. For over a year, Romain hunted in the city for these resilient bits of nature that have been attempting to regain the city.
Kwan Kam Cheong, the overall champion of the first Hong Kong Photo Book Awards, explores the dark side of Kowloon in the deepest of night. What originally started as a way to pass time between the end of his night shift and the arrival of the first day bus, has become an obsession for Kwan. In his work we will encounter the creatures of night; prostitutes, junkies, rats and moths captured in grainy black and white images.
Nick Poon was awarded the champion of the second Hong Kong Photo Book Awards (2013). Unlike the advertising industry which he works in, the philosophy of his photography is to document how some people are surviving in this unusual city. In this particular project, Nick used nothing more than his iPhone to create this body of work. He zooms in to the impossibly tiny shops and workplaces that provide the bread and butter for many people in Hong Kong.
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