Review of the series Hong Kong 2047

BETWEEN THE CAVE AND THE SUN

by Steve Bisson

«True rebellion is what calls into question the preconstituted order, not that it neglects it in favor of a permanently anarchic or hedonistic immaturity.»

In Quang Lam’s recent series ‘Hong Kong 2047’ the photographer alternates some vertical portraits of grotesque skyscrapers, depicted almost as if they were totems, with close-up images of remote control and surveillance systems. The cold linear, anonymous, vanishing geometries of these buildings are a reflection of the modern city condition. In it, we read the canons and the characteristics of that chase to heaven, which is a challenge to eternity rather than to height.

In the dense urban fabric of Hong Kong often cited by photographers, among all the late Michael Wolf, this form of constructive rationality is notoriously extreme. Here, the control of the land, contended historically until today, appears almost a translation of that infinite battle of saturation of the world. As inclusive totalitarianism from which one cannot escape. And this is why another form of control creeps into the city.

Behind the technological devices that register and file citizens, behind this instrumentalization of the more or less induced need for security, there is a structure dedicated to monitoring the dynamics of infinite growth. A paradigm that appears as paradoxical as the concept of world order, which forces all peoples into a new form of imprisonment. In this sense, it is useful to quote Michel Foucalt in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975).

A prison is somehow a new form of technological power with its own language, not just verbal. Like the prison told by John Carpenter in 1981 in the science fiction action film Escape from New York, in which the island of Manhattan in 1997 became the prison/theater of society’s outcasts.

Similarly, the Quang Lam series is a vision projected in 2047, in a dystopian environment dominated by camera controls, drone surveillance, artificial intelligence, computerized buildings, air pollution. In this scenario of asphalt, concrete, and glass, the last losers of globalization move like heroes of an elusive resistance. Somehow these images photograph an urban condition rather than a city itself.

They are so damned topical!

Excerpts from the article from Urbanautica website

https://urbanautica.com/review/between-the-cave-and-the-sun/1319