In 1955, when Andreas Gursky was a few months old, his parents smuggled him across a border - the one that, in those days, separated East Germany, where he was born, from West Germany, where he still lives. His father, Willy, a commercial photographer, set up a successful advertising business in Dusseldorf but as the young Andreas grew up, he wanted to cross into another zone: the one where photography could be considered art. In the 1970s, the two were still segregated.
'You were interested in photography or art, but you couldn't imagine it meant the same thing,' he says at the Gagosian Gallery in Central, carefully assessing his first solo exhibition in Asia.
The old frontiers have come down and Gursky is one of their dismantlers. Further checkpoints have been leap-frogged along the way: since the 1990s, when he started making the huge prints for which he's renowned, he's become immensely collectable.
Last November, one of his works, Rhein II, an image of the Rhine river, became the most expensive photo ever sold when Christie's auctioned it in New York for US$4.3 million. What did his father, now aged 91, think of that? 'Of course he's happy!' Gursky - a compact man who gives an attractive impression of latent energy - suddenly smiles. 'He couldn't imagine, at his time, that any photograph could be so successful.'
Rhein II isn't in the Gagosian show but 99 Cent II, Dyptichon is; despite the cut-price title, it was the most expensive photograph in the world in 2007, when Sotheby's sold one (there are six) for US$3.34 million. It's a vast (205.7cm by 682cm) image of a pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap American supermarket: stare at it for long enough and you begin to hyperventilate in front of the alien, and alienating, sheer thinginess of modern life. This is Gursky's hallmark. He has said, in the past, that he wants to look at the world as if he were an extraterrestrial being - to place himself beyond familiar boundaries - and, at his best, he can take you with him.
Not all the show's images are massive. There are a few relatively tiny ones, of which the smallest (at 53.4cm by 43.2cm) is Hong Kong, Shanghai Bank taken in 1994. Hong Kong was one of the earliest cities he visited in Asia and as the titles suggest (Nha Trang, 2004, Pyongyang IV, 2007) the region has proved stimulating: five of the 13 works on display are from his recent Bangkok series in which he photographed the surface of the Chao Phraya river.
'I thought it was interesting to have the Hong Kong bank, as a reference to the real world,' Gursky says; he always does his own hanging for a solo exhibition. 'But the Bangkok paintings are really abstract. Two years ago, if I'd seen them I wouldn't have believed these works were mine. It wasn't about what I could do next. It was more a question of intuition.'
