Hong Kong Tatler - June 2010 Big Shots

Ten pages of Hong Kong photography from the past fifty years selected by Davina Lee for Hong Kong Tatler.

Featuring Chan Chik, Yau Leung, Mak Fung, Tseng Kwong Chi, Alfred Ko, Greg Girard, Holly Lee, So Hing Keung, Hiram To, Nick Cheuk and Riddick Ning Yuen Sing.

When Tatler asked me to curate a photography gallery for their 400^th issue, the enormity of the task before me had not quite struck home, namely how to summarise over fifty years of Hong Kong photography in ten pages.  What follows is an imperfect history of Hong Kong photography – imperfect for the many images that had to be left out and for the many photographers it was not possible to include.  Imperfect in some eyes for the very loose definition adopted for Hong Kong photography.  In this collection you will find photographs of Hong Kong taken by overseas photographers, photographs of other cities taken by Hong Kong photographers, portraits, self-portraits and as we draw forward towards our own decade, conceptual photography that reveals as much about contemporary society in Hong Kong as do the most didactic of documentary photographs.  As the selected images shift by degrees from observation to interpretation, there is also a perceptible shift in the nature of critical enquiry away from the direct social critique inherent in the humanist photographs of Yau Leung, Mak Fung and Chan Chik towards the wider question of Hong Kong’s political autonomy and the social consequences of its phenomenal economic growth.  These photographs offer an alternative view of Hong Kong photography and chart the evolution in Hong Kong of the collective astuteness that has developed incrementally from self-awareness to self-confidence.

Davina Lee