Hong Kong’s Back Alleys: The Ugly, the Bad and the Good

Abstract

In this captivating new book, photographer Michael Wolf takes readers on another fascinating adventure into the rich cultural oasis of urban Hong Kong. Through his photographs, Wolf focuses our attention on elements that we would normally overlook without a second thought. Collaborating with international art curator Marc Feustel and heritage academics Lynne DiStefano, Lee Ho Yin and Lai Chi Pong, the book Informal Solutions examines the spontaneous artistry and accidental poetry flourishing in Hong Kong’s back alleys. Through this book, Wolf demonstrates once again that within Hong Kong’s seemingly predictable environment there are surprising places to be discovered. It is a kind of magic that photographer Michael Wolf sees and shares with us in his photography, taking us to places devoid of constructed aesthetics, and revealing the accidental poetics of spontaneity. The images presented in this captivating new book takes us to the least expected of places in Hong Kong, enabling readers to step into a world set apart, but one at once familiar in its ordinariness. Going beyond visual documentation, Wolf assumes an urban anthropological approach in using the medium of photography to carefully capture the implied activities of Hong Kong’s urban environment through artefacts found in its back alleys. The carefully curated images in the book allow us to experience Hong Kong’s back alleys in all their variety – a backdoor niche offering respite to a tired worker, a cluster of chairs waiting for occupants, places for storing non-valuables that are valued by someone. In some of the photographs, objects seem to come alive with human quality – lonely shoes longing to be filled by warm feet, happy work gloves waving at the camera, and long-haired mops posing for the photo. Indeed, Hong Kong’s back alleys take on a unique character of their own. They are more than a shortcut and access point, they are more than a seeming accumulation of junk or garbage. They are a place of activity, an urban space claimed, appropriated, used and sometimes enjoyed by many, especially by shop operators, workers and nearby residents. Hong Kong’s back alleys are about using space to its maximum, places for storage, for resting, for thinking, for just having a cigarette. This condensed and multi-layered use of space reflects the reality of Hong Kong’s built environment – small congested spaces for living and working, where every square meter counts and is exploited to the maximum. The book invites us to take a closer look at Hong Kong’s back alleys as a rich field of cultural artefacts that tell the living stories of a cross-section of the Hong Kong people. Back alleys speak to the creative spirit of these people, their capacity to occupy and humanize a seemingly bleak and unappealing environment, turning it into a revealing and sometimes theatrical show of human ingenuity in adapting to the constraints of our physical world.