Exploration and Reflection: Blue Lotus Gallery in 2025

© Palani Mohan

As we step into 2026, we take a moment to reflect on a year of exploration at Blue Lotus Gallery. From renowned Hong Kong photographers capturing the city’s past, to contemporary voices revealing its quieter, often overlooked corners, the programme traced a rich spectrum of perspectives on the metropolis and its ever-evolving identity.

Alongside this, the gallery deepened its engagement with Japan, turning attention toward its meditative landscapes, sacred architecture, and enduring spiritual traditions. Through exhibitions and publications by artists such as Michael Kenna, Yasuhiro Ogawa, and Ulana Switucha, we explored the interplay between past and present, nature and culture, and the ways in which photography can illuminate both the everyday and the transcendent

Austin Bell | Shooting Hoops
All 2,549 of Hong Kong’s Basketball Courts

Exhibition & Book Launch
17 January – 23 February 2025

Opening the year, Shooting Hoops set the tone for Blue Lotus Gallery’s 2025 programme with a project that was at once playful, meticulous, and quietly revelatory. American photographer Austin Bell presented the culmination of years spent documenting every single outdoor basketball court in his adopted home of Hong Kong, an extraordinary total of 2,549 sites scattered across the city.

What began as a fascination with the vivid colours and graphic designs of Hong Kong’s courts grew into an ambitious act of urban exploration. From densely packed housing estates to outlying islands, Bell’s project unfolded as a portrait of the city seen from above, where geometry, colour, and repetition revealed patterns often overlooked at street level. Shot largely by drone, the images transformed functional community spaces into bold, abstract compositions, while also mapping Hong Kong’s unique relationship to public space and sport.

Presented alongside the launch of the Shooting Hoops photobook, the exhibition invited viewers to see the city anew, not through its skyline, but through the everyday surfaces that quietly shape daily life.

© Austin Bell

‘Hong Kong Poetry’
Hong Kong’s Soul in Focus

Group Exhibition
22 March – 27 April 2025

Continuing the gallery’s longstanding engagement with Hong Kong, Hong Kong Poetry brought together works by Fan Ho, Palani Mohan, Thomas Gust, and Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, offering a multifaceted meditation on the city’s visual and emotional rhythms.

Spanning generations and approaches, the exhibition traced Hong Kong’s poetic potential through light, memory, language, and place. Fan Ho’s rare experimental works revisited the city of the 1950s and 60s with striking formal sensitivity, while Palani Mohan explored Hong Kong’s enduring relationship with the sea, capturing moments of quiet human connection amid coastal life. Thomas Gust introduced abstraction and painterly intervention, blending Romantic references with contemporary urban imagery, and Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze’s City Poetry series transformed aging street signage into lyrical reflections on time and language.

Together, the exhibition revealed Hong Kong as both subject and muse, a city where the everyday continually borders on the poetic.

© Palani Mohan

Echoing Above | Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Exhibition & Book Launch
17 – 25 May 2025

Echoing Above introduced a reflective pause in the programme, inviting viewers to reconsider Hong Kong by shifting their gaze upward. In this solo exhibition and accompanying monograph, Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze explored the overlooked world above the city’s streets, revealing stories embedded in architecture, nature, and craft.

The exhibition highlighted disappearing traditions such as bamboo scaffolding, constructed by skilled workers known as “spiders,” alongside resilient trees growing from walls and gutters, and the birdlife that continues to inhabit the city’s airspace. Together, these elements formed a portrait of Hong Kong as a place of quiet coexistence between the built and natural worlds.

Both tender and observant, Echoing Above encouraged a slower way of seeing, reminding viewers that even in one of the world’s densest cities, moments of balance, tradition, and resilience persist overhead.

© Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Pilgrimage | Michael Kenna & Yasuhiro Ogawa
A Spiritual Journey Through Japan’s Timeless Landscapes

Exhibition
6 June – 13 July 2025

As the programme increasingly turned toward Japan, Pilgrimage brought together two distinct yet complementary perspectives on the country’s spiritual and cultural landscapes. Featuring works by British photographer Michael Kenna and Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa, the exhibition explored pilgrimage not only as physical movement through sacred sites, but as a deeply personal and emotional journey.

Kenna’s photographs, made over more than four decades, offered serene black-and-white meditations on stillness, time, and place, often depicting shrines, pathways, and landscapes shaped by centuries of devotion. In contrast, Ogawa’s work pressed closer to lived experience, revealing memory, impermanence, and atmosphere through rich tones and emotive presence.

Together, their works formed a quiet dialogue between outsider and insider, revealing Japan through two ways of seeing that were distinct, yet deeply aligned.

© Yasuhiro Ogawa

Blue Lotus Revisited
A Retrospective Celebration

Group Exhibition
1 August – 12 October 2025

Mid-year, Blue Lotus Revisited provided an opportunity to reflect on the gallery’s own journey. Bringing together works by Greg Girard, Bianca Tse, Ian Lambot, Birdy Chu, Palani Mohan, Thomas Gust, Keith Macgregor, Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, Michael Kistler, Yasuhiro Ogawa, and Michael Kenna, the exhibition celebrated some of the most defining exhibitions and artists in the gallery’s history.

Rooted in Blue Lotus Gallery’s commitment to Hong Kong’s visual culture, the exhibition traced recurring themes of identity, memory, and transformation across decades of photographic practice. It was both a celebration of past milestones and a reaffirmation of the gallery’s role as a platform for thoughtful, culturally engaged photography.

Blue Lotus Revisited invited audiences to pause and look back, not with nostalgia, but with clarity and renewed perspective.

© Greg Girard

Torii | Ulana Switucha

Exhibition & Book Launch
15 November – 14 December 2025

Closing the year, Torii marked a culmination of the gallery’s deepening engagement with Japan’s spiritual landscape. Hong Kong–based Canadian photographer Ulana Switucha presented a body of work resulting from over a decade of travel through Japan’s quieter, lesser-known regions, with a focus on its sacred gateways.

Through her long-term dedication to torii, Switucha developed a deep familiarity with the subject. Her images present the gates as quiet sentinels within seas, forests, coastal shores, and snow-covered terrain, emphasising stillness, balance, and harmony between humanity and nature

Characterised by minimalism, soft light, and long exposures, the photographs invited viewers into a contemplative space, where each gate became a prompt for reflection and presence. Presented alongside the launch of the Torii photobook, the exhibition offered a fitting close to the year, one grounded in quiet observation and spiritual resonance.

© Ulana Switucha

Where Spirit Meets Landscape: Exploring Japan’s Sacred Spaces Through Photography

“Foggy Mountains” from “Lost in Kyoto” © Yasuhiro Ogawa

Across Japan, the sacred and the natural are inseparable. Temples hide among cedar forests, torii rise quietly from the sea, and mountains seem to breathe with ancient memory. It is a landscape shaped as much by spirit as by time, a place where stillness, reverence, and beauty coexist. Across past and present exhibitions, Blue Lotus Gallery has explored this meditative terrain through the eyes of Michael Kenna, Yasuhiro Ogawa, and Ulana Switucha, artists united by a shared sensitivity to the spaces where nature and spirit meet.

Michael Kenna: Silence and Form

Pagoda, Unpenji, Kagawa, Shikoku, Japan. 2003 © Michael Kenna

For more than forty years, British photographer Michael Kenna has returned to Japan, drawn to its contemplative atmosphere and quiet rituals. Working in black and white, he distils shrines, trees, and snow-covered fields into meditations on light and silence. His long exposures transform the landscape into a realm suspended between the physical and the spiritual.

Books such as Forms of Japan reflect this lifelong dialogue with the country’s sacred spaces. Whether capturing a solitary pine rising from a frozen lake or the faint outline of a temple shrouded in mist, Kenna reveals a Japan shaped by patience, restraint, and an enduring sense of devotion.

Yasuhiro Ogawa: The Journey Within

“Cherry Blossom” from “Lost in Kyoto” © Yasuhiro Ogawa

Where Kenna seeks transcendence in stillness, Yasuhiro Ogawa, a Japanese photographer and storyteller, approaches the sacred through movement, memory, and the quiet pulse of everyday life. His celebrated photobook Into the Silence retraces Bashō’s journey through northern Japan, weaving together snow-laden mountains, wind-beaten coasts, and the subtle gestures of travellers and strangers passing through.

Ogawa’s photographs carry the texture of memory: grain, shadow, the melancholy of things disappearing. His more recent book, Lost in Kyoto, deepens this exploration. Printed on black paper, the photographs feel as if they are emerging from darkness, revealing Kyoto as a city shaped not only by temples and rituals, but by the invisible layers of history that live and breathe within it. In both works, Ogawa listens for the human presence within sacred space: the fleeting moments where memory, landscape, and spirit entwine.

Ulana Switucha: Torii and the Sacred Threshold

Biwako, Shiga, Japan, 2016 From “Torii” © Ulana Switucha,

For Hong Kong–based Canadian photographer Ulana Switucha (who previously lived in Japan), the country’s landscapes have long been a source of creative and spiritual resonance. Having photographed Japan for decades, she has, in her most recent work, turned her attention to one of its most enduring symbols: the torii.

These elegant gates mark the threshold between the everyday and the divine, appearing in seas, lakes, and snow-covered plains as quiet sentinels watching over the landscape. In her book and exhibition Torii, Switucha captures them with measured clarity, using soft light, negative space, and long exposures to distil each scene to its essential form. Rising from the tide or standing against winter skies, the gates become meditative focal points, inviting viewers into a space where the spiritual and the natural begin to merge.

A Shared Reverence

“Autumn Bridge” from “Lost in Kyoto” © Yasuhiro Ogawa

Though distinct in approach, Kenna, Ogawa, and Switucha share a deep sensitivity to Japan’s spiritual landscape, a recognition that the sacred can be found not only in temples and shrines, but in the silence of a forest path, the quiet pull of the tide, or the soft glow of morning light. Their photographs invite us to slow down, to observe, and to feel the subtle presence of history, spirit, and nature that moves through these landscapes.

Together, their work offers a gentle reminder: in Japan, the sacred is not a destination, but a way of seeing — a dialogue between land, time, and the people who pass through it.

Ulana Switucha | Torii, an exhibition and book launch, is on view at Blue Lotus Gallery until 14 December 2025.

The City in Motion: Michael Kistler

American photographer Michael Kistler has spent the past two decades documenting urban life across the world. Originally from Minneapolis, he began his photographic journey at 18, exploring Europe with a compact Ricoh film camera. He subsequently settled in Tokyo, and spent a decade refining his distinctive — at times abstract — approach to street photography, using motion, blur, and layered compositions to capture the energy of urban life. In 2014, Kistler relocated to Hong Kong, where he continued to document the city’s streets with his characteristic eye for movement, composition, and colour, translating its unique rhythm into poetic, compelling imagery. Now back in the city after two years in Singapore, he continues to photograph and exhibit both in Hong Kong and internationally, while sharing his expertise through workshops and mentoring.

1. Your images often combine strong colour, motion, and layered city textures. Can you walk us through your process on the street, from spotting a scene to actually taking the frame?

Michael Kistler: Light, composition, and the moment are at the core of what I do. I identify locations with potential and then build compositions around either an interesting element or starting with a creative technique I think might fit well in that given situation. I am drawn less to the bright shiny object, per se, than to the idea and challenge of trying to create something interesting out of an otherwise everyday scene. And although HK is more intuitively a city of colour for me, I do shoot B&W a lot also, but it depends on the light and location.

2. Hong Kong has such a particular energy. How has living and shooting here shaped your practice and the way you see the city?

Michael Kistler: Hong Kong is electric, moving, and changing non-stop. I would say this type of energy naturally feeds my style of photography, as I am constantly trying to make sense of urban chaos by distilling it down into single frames. I can be in the middle of the busiest area of Hong Kong and find that everything slows down and becomes very quiet.

3. You’ve said, “Movement and motion have always been principal elements of my style.” Can you expand on that? How do you think about movement when composing and making decisions in the moment? 

Michael Kistler: First and foremost, I am drawn to the aesthetic of blurred movement. When done well, it can be very beautiful and almost impossible to repeat in the same way again. I rarely, if ever, use a tripod, so I am either using various urban surfaces to stabilise my camera or experimenting with ICM (intentional camera movement). I am quite minimalist when it comes to gear, but I like the results of having certain constraints and limitations while also employing as much of the environment as I can.

4. You shoot both on your iPhone and traditional cameras. What do you enjoy about each medium, and how does your approach shift between them?

Michael Kistler: I actually shoot very little on my phone, only using it for snaps here and there. If I am creating fine art content, doing a shoot, or coaching, I will always be working on a professional camera. However, I don't believe camera choice is overly important in the end; a camera is a tool and a vehicle for producing what hopefully is a compelling image. My philosophy is that photography should be principally concerned with image creation, not equipment.

5. Through your workshops and mentoring, you’ve guided many photographers in developing their street practice. What’s the most common challenge you see students face, and how do you help them overcome it?

Michael Kistler: I think most people find the aforementioned combination of light, composition, and moment the most challenging, and this is why it has become the ultimate point of emphasis for me when I am coaching, mentoring, and leading workshops. Another challenge is establishing a recognisable style in their photography--there is a tendency with less experienced photographers to want to shoot everything. I work with people a lot on training and developing their eye, which eventually will allow them to be more discerning about what they are shooting and also more successful at reducing larger scenes into more impactful frames.

6. What’s one piece of practical advice you’d give to emerging street photographers who are trying to develop their own voice?

Michael Kistler: Shoot, shoot, and shoot! But shoot with intention. I would say it's very important to be considered in one's photography: what are you shooting and how do you want it to look? This allows a person to then work almost backward to find the right technical combinations as well as creative techniques to achieve their desired images. 

7. Looking ahead, are there any projects, ideas, or directions you’re excited to explore next, either in Hong Kong or beyond?

Michael Kistler: I have some Tokyo workshops coming up, as well as working to develop more regular street workshops in Macau. Additionally, as I have spent a lot of time working to further develop my Tokyo portfolio over the last two years, I am planning a solo exhibition of a selection of B&W work early in 2026.

Torii: Between the Real and the Sacred

Ulana Switucha, ‘Konpira’, Hokkaido, Japan 2019

In northern Japan, a lone wooden structure rises from an icy platform amid frosty shallows. Its striking red frame, draped with icicles, stands against a monochrome horizon that stretches into the distance, timeworn yet steadfast, a quiet threshold between worlds. For Canadian photographer Ulana Switucha, who has spent decades tracing Japan’s spiritual landscape, such moments of stillness are both subject and practice. Her new series and photobook, Torii, are the culmination of years spent traveling Japan to photograph the country’s most iconic and sacred gateways.

Torii, the elegant red gates that mark the entrance to Shinto shrines, are among the most iconic symbols of Japan. Traditionally built from wood or stone, their simple yet striking form, two vertical posts crossed by a horizontal beam, signifies the transition from the ordinary to the sacred. According to Shinto belief, passing through a Torii marks one’s passage into a purified space inhabited by kami, the divine spirits believed to dwell within nature. Whether standing at the edge of the sea, deep within forests, or before a mountain shrine, these gates are both physical markers and spiritual metaphors: bridges between the human and the divine.

Ulana Switucha, Arashi, Kanto, Japan. 2024

Her interest in them began decades ago, when she lived in Japan. Since then, she has returned regularly, drawn by a deep and enduring connection to the country’s spiritual traditions and landscapes. “These photographs are part of a long-term journey photographing the Japanese spiritual landscape in both known and remote locations,” she explains. “The journey began when I was a resident in Japan, continued over the years with regular visits, and will carry on into the future.”

For the artist, Torii are far more than architectural symbols. They are reminders of reverence, of harmony between humankind and nature. “When I see a Torii or a meoto iwa in a natural setting, I instinctively slow down and reflect on my surroundings,” she says. “I see the soft colours of Sakura, the brilliance of autumn, the scent of a forest. I hear the gentle rhythmic sound of waves.”

Her images are striking in their restraint and purity, deliberately reducing the forms to their quiet, essential core. “By using simple, often minimal, compositions I try to communicate not only the diversity and elegance of the architectural forms in their landscape, but also the stillness that comes with the experience of being present,” she explains. The act of photographing becomes, for her, a kind of meditation — a practice of patience and presence. “Each time, waiting and watching for the right light, or for the tide to come in, was a form of meditation and of mono no aware: the recognition of permanence and intransience.”

Ulana Switucha, Fuji, Hakone, 2023

Many of the locations she photographs are far from the tourist trail. Ulana seeks solitude and discovery, often finding lesser-known Torii through meticulous research or chance encounters. “While some of the Torii in this project are recognizable, many are in lesser-known places found through both painstaking research and unexpected discovery,” she notes. In these quiet landscapes, the boundaries between nature, culture, and spirit blur, and the viewer is invited to pause and reflect.

Ulana Switucha, Ariake, Kyushu, Japan, 2019

Torii is more than a collection of images; it is an invitation to journey through Japan’s unseen spiritual landscape, to slow down, observe, and reconnect with a sense of quiet reverence. “The book takes you through a journey of discovery,” Ulana says. “One begins by arriving at sea… before slowly wandering from one floating Torii to another. Along the way, you are invited to participate in your own reflection and meditation.”

Ulana Switucha | Torii, an exhibition and book launch, is on view at Blue Lotus Gallery from 15 November until 14 December 2025

Echoes of Hong Kong: Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

On Top of It All, 2024 © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Since its founding, Blue Lotus Gallery has championed artists whose work reveals the many layers of Hong Kong, past and present. Among this new generation is French photographer Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, whose images form a vivid tribute to this captivating metropolis.

Arriving in Hong Kong in 2009, Jacquet-Lagrèze devoted himself to photographing the details that make it unique: from the distinctive street signs found throughout the city to its stunning vertical architecture, most recently explored in his photo book Echoing Above, revealing where the delicate balance between the natural and built environments lies.

Having recently returned to his native France after sixteen years in the city, he reflects on his time in Hong Kong, the work it inspired (some of which are featured in Blue Lotus Revisited), and how it has shaped him personally and professionally.

29 Fort Street, 2023 © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

You spent 16 years in Hong Kong, from 2009 to 2025. How did you see the city evolve over those years, and which changes felt most significant?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: The city has evolved a lot in the past fifteen years. When I arrived, it felt much more raw with many old-style buildings, tons of neon lights above my head when walking through the streets. Most of the neon is now gone due to regulation, and many old buildings have disappeared to leave space to newer, posh buildings. As the city evolved, I really feel that an intense feeling of nostalgia emerged in all Hong Kongers. More old buildings are being renovated instead of pulled down, many movies highlight the most raw aspects of Hong Kong history like the Kowloon Walled City, and I even start to see some shops or restaurants trying to reintroduce big neon signs. It feels like people in HK have realised what makes it a unique place and are trying to treasure it more nowadays.

Echoing Above, your recent photobook explored Hong Kong’s verticality. What drew you to look upward, and what do those perspectives reveal about the city’s character?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: I was drawn into this project by looking at the trees growing wild on residential buildings in the middle of the city. And by looking up at the trees, I began to notice the men building scaffolding high up on the facades as well as the diversity of birds flying in between the buildings. So I decided to include all three aspects in the book and show how they echo with each other.

263 Ki Lung Street, 2022 © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

In that series, you also photographed the “spiders” and their bamboo scaffolding, a long-standing tradition that is now being phased out. What do these images represent to you, and what does their disappearance say about the changing city?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: Each time I witness these men building scaffolding, I feel amazed by their skill. They look so calm when they do it, but it looks scary to us from the street, watching them. I find this contrast fascinating. I also admire the way the skills they used are part of the city's heritage. It was here already centuries ago with bamboo theatres, and it is incredible to see how this skill, passed through the generations, has been applied to modern-day life for the building and renovation of buildings. Even though the use of bamboo scaffolding for construction is set to decrease, I believe that this skill will remain alive for a long time.

Echoes of Flight, 2025 © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Many of your photographs balance striking architecture with small traces of human life. How do you think about the relationship between the city and the people who inhabit it, and what makes this dynamic unique in Hong Kong compared to elsewhere?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: The city is made up of the people who live in it. They are the ones who give it life and its atmosphere. That’s why lately I like to have some form of living presence in each of my photos, people, but also birds or trees. Hong Kong is unique because of its topography and its rapid development, shaped by history and its location. But I think what really makes Hong Kong so recognisable and special is the resilience, creativity, and energy of the people who live here.

As Hong Kong continues to transform, do you see your photographs more as a way of documenting those changes, or as a personal artistic vision of the city?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: I think my photographs have both of these aspects. I tend to be mostly inspired by things that are now here but that are slowly disappearing. So although my first intent is artistic, there is a documentary aspect that is bound with each of my works. I actually like it the most when the marks of time are obvious in my photos. Like for my series “City Poetry”, where I take photos of the oldest Chinese characters on shop signs in the streets of Hong Kong. This is probably why one of the artworks from this project was selected for a group exhibition about Chinese characters at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.

Crafting the Pathway, 2024 © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Now that you’ve returned to France, how do you reflect on your years in Hong Kong, both personally and artistically?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: I think that I wouldn't have become a photographer if I didn't live in Hong Kong. It is this city that inspired me the most visually and drew me into photography. I learned all that I know about it here. All these years here have trained my eye. And I can witness the difference from before by seeing how I can now find inspiration in Paris, while I was unable to ten years ago. And it is in Hong Kong that I managed to make my art reach an audience of collectors thanks to Blue Lotus Gallery, with whom I have been partnering for twelve year now. So I am very grateful to Hong Kong, and I am quite sure that I will keep a large part of my artistic energy devoted to this city.

Escape, 2024 © Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

As you mentioned, Blue Lotus has played an important role in your career. You began working with the gallery in 2013, and since then have held four solo exhibitions — Blue Moment (2016), City Poetry (2019), 36 Views of Lion Rock (2022), and most recently, Echoing Above (2025). Looking back, how has this ongoing collaboration influenced your journey as an artist, and what does exhibiting with Blue Lotus mean to you?

R. Jacquet-Lagrèze: I think I wouldn’t be where I am without Blue Lotus Gallery and its director, Sarah Greene. Looking back, I’m really happy with all the exhibitions we’ve done together over the years. On top of that, the gallery has also brought me a lot of inspiration through the great photographers they work with. Visually and artistically, I’ve been most influenced by Fan Ho, so I was very glad to have the opportunity to share a duo exhibition with his work last year in Belgium and the Netherlands. I’ve also been inspired by the journeys of other great photographers like Greg Girard, Michael Kenna, Michael Wolf, Marcel Heijnen, and Yasuhiro Ogawa, all of whom I discovered through Blue Lotus. I think the gallery does a wonderful job of highlighting and sharing with the world the vibrant culture of Hong Kong and Asia, past and present, and I’m very glad to be a part of it.

Selected images from “Echoing Above” are featured in our current exhibition, Blue Lotus Revisited, on view until October 12.

Hong Kong Then and Now: In Conversation with Greg Girard

Golden Lion Bar, Wanchai, Hong Kong, 1974 © Greg Girard

Since our inception, Blue Lotus Gallery has remained committed to exploring Hong Kong’s identity and culture through the lens of photography, and few have done so in the manner of Greg Girard.

Though born in Vancouver, Girard is best known for his depictions of East Asia’s major cities, capturing them during a period of dramatic transformation in the late 20th century. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his work in Hong Kong, a city he first visited in 1974 and later called home for over a decade. Arriving during the so-called Golden Age — a time of swift economic expansion and cultural change — he documented the city with a sharp eye for light, colour, and composition: from its neon-lit nightscapes to the labyrinthine interiors of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City.

Bar Interior, Hong Kong, 1985 © Greg Girard

Today, his vision of a bygone Hong Kong returns to the city in a striking new form. HK:PM, a moving presentation of Girard’s analogue photographs from the 1970s to 1990s, is currently illuminating the monumental M+ Facade — one of the world’s largest media displays — and is also being shown at Hong Kong International Airport. Selected prints from the series are featured in our ongoing group exhibition, Blue Lotus Revisited, which reflects on the gallery’s most iconic moments and artists to date.

Wan Loy Teahouse, Mongkok, Hong Kong, 1985 © Greg Girard

'Plaza Grill', Wanchai, Hong Kong, 1974 © Greg Girard

Let’s start with HK:PM on the M+ Facade. What was it like seeing your work projected at that scale and in that context, across the Hong Kong skyline?

G.Girard: Quite unreal. I more or less know my pictures, and I more or less know the Hong Kong skyline, but to see the former superimposed on the latter was a pronounced shift in the usual frames of reference.

What was the process like for adapting your still photographs into a moving-image presentation? Did it challenge how you normally think about sequencing or narrative?

G.Girard: Sequencing pictures is something I've done before, for books and exhibitions, and more recently in a film-type display with live music in a cinema setting (at M+ last year), but this was the first time to consider how they might look on one of the world's largest video displays. This introduces new possibilities, and constraints as well. How might they look from various distances? How will they look in the midst of other displays on the skyline, with marine traffic, or partially glimpsed from a ferry mid-harbour? I gladly accepted guidance from the team at M+, who have worked on this with other artists, and then you have your own instincts and ideas as well about how things might flow together at this unprecedented scale.

HK:PM on the M+ Facade © Greg Girard / M+

You spent over a decade living in Hong Kong during its so-called ‘golden age.’ Looking back at those photographs now, how do you feel about that period in your life, both personally and creatively? How did that time shape your practice?

G Girard: Looking back at those photographs underlines what a key time it was for me, being slightly adrift in the beginning and then finding my way. I was always hugely attracted to Hong Kong, or maybe I should say to photographing in Hong Kong. Either way, the city gave me my start as a working photographer, which I note and pay tribute to in the film "Hong Kong Made Me". And as it happens, the period was indeed what's now considered the city's "golden age". Though of course you rarely realize you're in the golden age of anything until it's over.

Children Playing on Walled City Rooftop, Hong Kong 1989 © Greg Girard

'Pussy Cat Club', Wan Chai, Hong Kong, 1974 © Greg Girard

How do you see the city today compared to the one you captured in the 1980s and ’90s? What strikes you most about what has changed, or what hasn’t?

G Girard: Every place goes through an evolution on its way to becoming its most authentically realised version of itself. For Hong Kong, up until now, it has to be that period in the 80s and 90s where Hong Kong's popular culture was not only consumed in HK but also exported around the world. For many, it was received as "Chinese" popular culture, since the mainland hadn't yet started producing and exporting film or music on a comparable level, though it soon would.

Woman at tram stop, Central, Hong Kong, 1974 © Greg Girard

In addition to M+, some images from HK:PM are currently on display at Hong Kong International Airport and in our ongoing exhibition "Blue Lotus Revisited". This means they will reach a diverse audience, ranging from photography enthusiasts to people who might not typically engage with photography or gallery exhibitions. What do you hope viewers from these different backgrounds will take away from your work?

G.Girard: Like any billboard or public display in a setting where you're surrounded by, bombarded by sensory stimuli, you mostly tune it out as you go about your day or evening. If any of the images causes a person to linger long enough to do a double-take, and wonder "hmm, what's that?" I'll consider it a wildly successful connection to me and Hong Kong and Hong Kong's recent past.

HK:PM is on display nightly on the M+ Façade until September 28.

Selected images from the series are featured in our current exhibition, Blue Lotus Revisited, on view until October 12.