STUDIOVOICE #7 — Michael Wolf’s Hong Kong Trilogy

The original text was written in Japanese for STUDIOVOICE on January 28, 2014. This English version translates and edits the text embedded in the archival page image.

Michael Wolf, Hong Kong Trilogy

People Who Live the City

There are moments when living in a city produces an unmistakable discomfort.

When one looks at the lights of high-rise buildings, each small room cut by a square frame contains a person, and behind each person there are decades of a life. The obvious fact that all of these lives are compressed into buildings, operating in the present progressive tense, suddenly presses against us. One cannot help becoming conscious of the scale of the city and of its absurdity.

In ordinary facts, in the continuity called daily life, all kinds of scenes are drifting. A photographer, perhaps, is someone who can cut out that moving idea with a frame and translate what is “being seen” into a visual message. What we normally pass over appears, when taken into the photographer’s frame, as a strong image placed directly before the eyes.

The photographer I want to introduce here is Michael Wolf, a German photographer based in Hong Kong.

After many years as a photojournalist for Stern, Wolf remained fascinated by the exposed condition of people living inside enormous cities. In Inside and Outside, he photographed both the exterior and interior of Hong Kong’s massive public housing. In Tokyo Compression, he turned toward the crowded trains of Tokyo. In FY, he collected confrontational gestures found through Google Street View. In The Transparent City, he observed the closed interiors of high-rise buildings from the outside.

When I first saw The Transparent City in 2008, I immediately wanted to see his other work. There are not many photographers whose images make one want to meet them, or at least to ask what they are actually looking at. Wolf was one of the exceptions.

His newly released Hong Kong Trilogy can be described simply as a collection of fragments from the backstreets of Hong Kong, gathered while walking through the city. Yet the word “backstreet” may already sound nostalgic in a cleaned-up Tokyo. In Hong Kong, the backstreet still has a dampness, a border condition, a place where laborers live and where the objects they pile up accumulate their own strange sensitivity.

Mops, gloves, tools, laundry, and nameless devices appear almost like installations made by citizens without knowing that they were making installations. The way laundry catches on a line, the way objects hang from walls, the way a signboard decays: everything begins to look slightly suspicious, as if daily life itself had developed a private sense of humor.

These are countless real installations born in the shadow of skyscrapers and in the lives of people in the market. Picking up fragments of everyday astonishment, Michael Wolf continues to walk the streets of Hong Kong with a camera in one hand.

Notes

1. Inside and Outside combines photographs of the exterior of Hong Kong’s public housing, taken before demolition, with interviews of residents inside the buildings. The experimental way of reading the gap between exterior and interior recalls, in a different register, the Japanese television program You Are There.
2. Wolf visited Japan for the Tokyo Compression series.
3. FY collects landscapes from Google Street View through an absolute visual cut.

Michael Wolf
Hong Kong Trilogy
Peperoni Books, edition of 400.