Animation of Density: Serial Parallels in Hong Kong’s High-Rise Architecture

Hong Kong is a unique world city, defined in no small part by its dense and architecturally extreme high-rise housing estates. This has been much-documented through photography, most notably by Michael Wolf in his Architecture of Density (2009) photo series. Photography is an ideal medium to convey a sense of scale of the repetitive patterns of buildings. It presents a fixed representation of the built environment. Stylized and impressive, it has itself become a stereotype of Hong Kong, ready to be consumed by tourists and Instagrammers.
To create a novel engagement with Hong Kong’s architecture, my animation work Serial Parallels (2019) approaches Hong Kong’s built environment from the conceptual perspective of celluloid film, by applying the technique of film animation to the photographic image. The city’s signature architecture of horizon-eclipsing housing estates is reimagined as parallel rows of film strips: Serial Parallels. High-resolution photographs of building facades are re- animated through vertical/serial and horizontal/parallel movements, with each floor or window corresponding to a film frame. What was fixed becomes fluid, through the spatio-temporal sequencing of architectural patterns. What was literally set in stone in the single image becomes a re-animated film sequence of architectural flow. Through this process, new visual and temporal relationships are forged, and new movement is created, through which an entirely new perspective on the city emerges.