So Hing Keung

signed in Chinese, titled, numbered 2/5 and dated 1998

Hong Kong, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Art Biennial 1998
Canada, Halifax, St Mary's University Gallery, Hong Kong Art, 2000
Hong Kong, Hong Kong Film Archive, Artists in the Neighbourhood Scheme Reconstructing a City, 2002
China, Guangzhou, Guangzhou International Photo Biennale, 2007

This Mortal Coil: So Hing Keung's Alienated Urban Landscape Photographs, Hong Kong Cultural Imaging Workshop, Hong Kong, 1999
Fotografia, No. 15, Poland, No. 15. 2004
Hong Kong Photographers Series One - So Hing Keung, Asia One, Hong Kong, 2008.

 

framed under plexiglass, generally in good condition
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Hong Kong is obscure, unfamiliar and confusing to So Hing Keung.  The modernizing process of its motherland ever the more so, thus, the prominent Hong Kong photographer makes certain his camera finds its way to all its inherent contradictions and imminent collisions.  After a stint in mainland China, So Hing Keung reverted his attention back to Hong Kong in 1993, moved away from documentary photography and began working with Polaroid's.  Post-production includes dark room techniques such as double exposure, superimposition, chemical and physical manipulation of negatives and positives, collage, direct sketching and scratching, etc.  He alternates and combines such technical tools according to his rawest whim and transposes his subjective views in a semi-abstract, sometimes surrealist manner.  In the year after the Handover, Hong Kong has not yet undergone drastic transformation and Central, Hong Kong, 1998 (Lot 605) was a work of the liminal time.  Residential against commercial buildings of Central and Mid-levels fill the entirety of the image.  Grid-like scratches by the artist's hand are metaphorical cages attempting to constrain the excess of construction and an expression of So Hing Keung's blatant protest.  The contents of the image should be so familiar, yet are made to be unfamiliar.  The fusion between a deliberately coarse scratching and chromatic treatment of a dull yellow represents a lamentation over the contamination of the city and is the artist's unique interpretation of a post-Handover Hong Kong.