As a photographer, Siu Wai Hang’s practice explores the fundamentals of the medium of photography, while creating social and historical commentary. In this intimate show, Tomorrow Maybe aims to provide an entry point into the artist’s ongoing examination into the medium particularly with time, as experienced, as perceived, both subjectively and collectively, and represented through form.
In Open Ta Kung Pao (2018) and Hennnnnnnnnnnnesssssssssssssy (2019), Siu Wai Hang lengthens the scene of the July 1st protest. Through this manipulation, an inversion is produced, a symbolic void that modifies the viewer’s way of seeing and reading the event, both enhancing and distorting the intensity and interpretation of what is perceived.
In The Elusive (2015), Siu Wai Hang creates a mechanical viewing device that entices the viewer to peer closer, placing the viewer in a voyeuristic role. By reproducing images of barricades captured from slightly different perspectives, the viewer is only able to gather information in bits and pieces rendering information almost illegible. Creating an automated flip book of images of military barricades in Hong Kong, the work seeks to reproduce a feeling of something both near and distant. Much like the systems hidden behind the gates, we must bypass obstacles to see the truth.
Finally, Strokes of Light, is a new series of photographs that captures light before the film is loaded into the camera, and in the same frame, the moment the camera catches light when the negative is being unloaded. The Greek root of “photography” means “writing” (graphé) with “light” (Phōs). In Strokes of Light, light is being documented in a process prior to mechanical intervention, bringing ambiguity to the nature of photography, pointing to image making absent of both camera and photographer.