Superstructure Playgrounds: Re-Animating Hong Kong’s Architecture

Hong Kong’s high-density, high-rise cityscape has been much documented through photography. Photography presents a fixed representation of the built environment, which makes it an ideal medium to capture the immense scale of the repetitive patterns of buildings. Stylized and impressive, this has itself become a stereotype of Hong Kong, ready to be consumed by tourists and Instagrammers. Photography-based experimental moving image has the potential to create different engagements with Hong Kong’s signature architecture that go beyond such fixed representation. By manipulating their source images these films transpose their subject matter into new kinetic configurations. The Doors (Chilai Howard 2008) presents a rhythmical choreography of opening and closing doors of a public housing estate, while in Ray Mok and Red Wong’s Iam Twisq (2018) music video for Isan high-rise buildings are turned into a colourful urban playground. Serial Parallels (Max Hattler 2019) applies the technique of film animation to the photographic image, reimagining the city’s housing estates as parallel rows of film strips, or serial parallels. Here, what was fixed becomes fluid, through the spatio-temporal sequencing of architectural patterns. Through such processes, new visual and temporal relationships are forged, and new meaning is created, through which new perspectives on the city emerge.