Photography is Joseph Fung Hon-kee's all-consuming life-long passion. 'To me it is like a drug,' says the 72-year-old photographer, teacher and curator. 'Once you touch it, you get addicted for life.'
So it comes as no surprise that he is one of the driving forces behind the inaugural Hong Kong Photo Festival, which kicks off on November 27. Presented by the Hong Kong Photographic Culture Association - a group started by Fung and 17 other local photographers last year to promote the city as a regional photographic hub - the month-long cross-regional event will include nine exhibitions, an array of workshops and seminars, and a photography competition.
The highlight will be three major exhibitions that promise to provide glimpses into early photography in Hong Kong and life on the mainland in the past few decades, and to showcase the medium as a means to pursue contemporary art in Greater China. Fung, the overall curator of Four Dimensions - Contemporary Photography from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan & Macau, says photography can reflect differences in the areas' social and political life. For example, a 'sense of belonging' has been an issue in Hong Kong since 1997, he says, while on the mainland, there is a 'very strong' sense of identity - and the photographers there have made some bolder statements.
But, on the whole, there are more commonalities than differences between the approaches of the photographers chosen across Greater China, Fung says. The veteran photographer has also spotted a recent trend: Chinese photography is no longer purely of a 'social documentary' nature. but there's an increasing desire to 'want to show something broader ... more artistic, personal and conceptual'.
For example, in her series of work that depicts Taiwanese apartments built from the 1960s to the 80s, Lin Yu-ting sculpted facades of these buildings from a cake before taking photos of the miniature model. Lin says she used cake as a medium because she wanted to give familiar scenes a different look, while still conveying the warmth and evocativeness of these homes.
'You can almost taste the sweetness of the visuals. Photography today enables many more layers of interpretation,' says Chou Ching-hui, curator of the Taiwan section in Four Dimensions. Chou's own recent project, Wild Aspirations - The Yellow Sheep River, takes that multi-layered approach. The piece depicts a village in Gansu province that was chosen to receive computers from a charity.