to begin with, there's no matter Goethe-Institut Hongkong Until Sep 25
For centuries, communities and institutions communicated with the public through noticeboards. They were used by governments, businesses, schools and churches. Now, however, physical noticeboards are being replaced by their digital counterparts.
In his latest solo exhibition of photographs, anothermountainman (aka Stanley Wong Ping-pui) ponders these nearly obsolete noticeboards. His images are formal, for the most part, consisting of fields of meticulously composed colour and texture, with a prevailing sense of absence, emptiness and neglect.
Similar to his Lan Wei series of abandoned buildings, there is a genuine attempt at subtext, as Wong observes a potentially important transition in communication with a sense of entropy and nostalgia.
Wong's photographs appear to speak for a time when these boards symbolised a kind of history of communication and community and, by extension, as mediators between people or power structures. Yet visually, many are more high-modernist abstraction than historically or socially evocative, missing some of the haunting quality of his Lan Wei images.
Reminiscent of Aaron Siskind, or other masters of mid-20th century photographic abstraction, though lacking their technical perfection, the images vacillate between a sense of loss and an almost non-objective flatness - and notably dominated by the latter. This tends to funnel one's attention towards colour, line and texture and away from any potent social or cultural subtext.
