Vertical Horizon
I arrived in Hong Kong in 2009. After living in the middle of this city for a while, I grew fonder and fonder of its strong visual character. This place has so many things to say that recording it with a camera began to feel like an urge.
Through the medium of photography, I wanted to find an original ‘angle’ that would open up a fresh perspective on what I found most captivating about Hong Kong: its sheer density and ‘vertical sprawl’. The solution finally came to me while gazing at the moving clouds framed between towers. The idea was to look straight up, focusing my vision on the vertical development of the city. Shifting the perspective in such a close-packed city enabled me to convey my visual shock just as intensely as it was felt.
I can’t think of any other city in the world whose verticality has been taken to quite the extreme as in Hong Kong. The future of the city is not to go out further and further, but to build up higher and higher. It is this ‘vertical horizon’ I wanted to show in my photo series.
I started working on the series in 2011, literally learning about the city as I went along. Now it has been over six years since Vertical Horizon began. Some photos from the series have become records of now-demolished buildings or drastically changed places. A few others have become iconic shots of Hong Kong. I was stunned by the extent of the phenomenon when I discovered that some Hollywood productions – notably Transformers 4 and Ghost in the Shell – had also chosen ‘my’ spot as a scene location.
For the third edition of the book (May 2017), I’ve added my latest photos taken in 2016. Some are of places that had somehow escaped my notice before, while others show buildings that didn’t exist a few years ago. Also included are a selection of images of Macau, the sister-city of Hong Kong, which shares the same vertical growth and some similarities in terms of architecture.