Tell Japanese photojournalist Hiromi Hoshino she looks Chinese and she flashes a smile. 'Everyone says that,' she declares, discreetly filing away the remark as a compliment. Ever since she can remember, Hoshino has yearned for some kind of link to China. 'When I was a high school student, I asked my father a lot of times: 'Am I really Japanese?' ' she recalls. 'He showed me my birth record, and said: 'I think you're really Japanese.' ' While most people eventually rid themselves of childhood fantasies, Hoshino fed hers by studying Chinese history and Putonghua at the International Christian University in Tokyo and, later, by entering the Chinese University in Hong Kong to master Cantonese. Her admittedly vague goal was to write a book on China. Thanks, Chinese and Impressions of South China (both published in 1996 by Joho-Centre Shuppankyoku) are the result. The former is a collection of stories about people she met during the summers of 1993 and 1994 on a 4,000-kilometre boat-and-bus trip from the China-Vietnam border town of Dongxing to Shanghai. The latter is a photographic record of the journey. Though she says that writing is her first love, the foreword to Impressions reveals another passion: 'As soon as I started the trip, my body holding the camera started to move as it liked, completely out of my control. 'My body wanted to be liberated from my mind. My body wanted to feel the air, to feel the people.' Trite as it may sound, Hoshino was propelled by this rationale from one South China locale to another - passing through Beihai, Guangzhou, Shantou, Xiamen, Quanzhou, Fuzhou and Ningbo, among other places. Along the way she met scores of characters, all of whom impressed her - if only because she perceived they had been fed with a wooden spoon in contrast to her silver one. 'Japanese tend to stick to their own country and to rely on the Government, and think Japan is the best. Chinese don't have a government that protects them. They just survive by themselves. I wanted to be that kind of person. That was the motivation for me to go to South China.' Hoshino's photographs in Impressions, 55 of which are on display at the Fringe Gallery in her first Hong Kong showing, reveal a curious, sometimes naive, eye. In one of many examples of her mastery of light, a silver-haired storekeeper sits barefoot in front of a small television set as she eats from a tin bowl. The shot was published in the popular Japanese magazine Marco Polo in 1993. 'When I went back the next year, I wanted to show her the magazine,' says Hoshino, who was surprised to find her in exactly the same setting - sitting on an old wooden chair in front of the TV. 'I wanted to explain I had brought the magazine just to show her, but she got so angry she didn't listen to me. Maybe she thought I was trying to sell her something, but I was hurt.' Not all her subjects are as suspicious. On Meizhou, a small island off Fujian province, she bumped into a pedicab driver she had met on her first trip. She photographed him and his family on a beach. Later the man told her he was planning to move to Japan and wanted her to organise the trip. In another photograph, of four men passing the time on the waterfront, Hoshino's caption reads: 'What I really want to know is the bad news.' Those, she says, are the words of someone she met, who complained: 'All I ever hear in the Chinese press is how good things are.' While many of her photos inspire viewers to take a closer look, some appear to have been shot principally for a Japanese audience. Take, for example, the gory photos of carcasses - of pigs, chickens and cattle - that are portrayed as carrion. 'We don't see this sort of thing in Japan, because meat is packed neatly,' says Hoshino. 'I think it's good Chinese people don't hide these kinds of things - it makes you realise that human beings, too, are animals.' There are also inanimate subjects in her photographic tour. It is in these that her sense of colour is brilliantly obvious - for example in the blue 'fish tank' containing ripe, red watermelons. Early in Impressions, Hoshino reveals: 'In China, I felt like a house cat surrounded by alley cats.' Then she says: 'I am slowly losing my naivety. But that's not so bad.' That Hoshino, 31, is consciously trying to be street-wise is obvious. So too is her attempt to get a wider picture of life: instead of close-up shots of her subjects, she favours maintaining a comfortable distance. 'I want to stay back a little and I want to see the light and the atmosphere, the scenery and the person together as a composition,' she says. 'Sometimes I feel that if I get close [to my subject] I can't always see clearly.' Her encounters have evidently given her a deeper understanding of South China and, as she puts it, 'reminded me that I have another part of me'. Impressions of South China will run until October 11 at the Fringe Gallery in the Fringe Club, 2 Lower Albert Road, South Block, Central. Tel: 2521-7251
