Can I Call It Home: Emmanuel Serna
Book Launch
Sunday 26 October, 3–5 pm.
Venue: Blue Lotus Gallery
Book Launch: ‘Can I call it Home?’ by Emmanuel Serna
Sunday 26 October, 3-6pm.
Address: 28 Pound Lane, Sheung Wan, HK
Opening Hours: Tue-Saturday, 11am-6pm
Free Entrance
We are pleased to announce the release of Can I Call It Home, a new photobook by Emmanuel Serna, published by Brownie Publishing, Hong Kong. The book presents a collection of intimate snapshots of Hong Kong, each image a quiet story, capturing the city’s rhythm, character, and everyday life.
Though born and raised in France, Hong Kong holds a special place for Emmanuel Serna. He has called the city home for 15 years — it is where he met his wife, and where they began their family. His photographs of the city are therefore deeply personal: intimate, nuanced depictions that stand far removed from the familiar tourist clichés.
Captured over the course of a decade and a half, this body of work reflects Serna’s ongoing contemplation of his adopted home and its inhabitants. How do they act in their daily lives when freed from external pressures? What relationships and interactions do they maintain with public space? How do they occupy it, and what temporary or permanent traces do they leave behind? How do they manage to feel at home in places beyond the confines of their apartments or houses? In essence, how can they truly be themselves?
In a city where private space is scarce, some residents deliberately claim public spaces or natural areas — appropriating and reshaping them, temporarily or permanently, in their own image. While private spaces remain enclosed, guarded, and secret — locked doors, security cameras, watchful guards — public spaces are open and exposed, allowing everyone to act almost as they please.
It is these moments of everyday life that Serna seeks to capture and translate through his lens, always subjectively. Ultimately, the project also represents his own introspection — a quiet reflection, through photography, on his place within this city. After all these years, is he now a Hongkonger, or still a foreigner observing Hongkongers?
Emmanuel Serna was born in 1973 in Lunel, France. He studied photography in Paris before devoting his early career to documenting the aftermath of the civil wars in the Balkans — including Kosovo, Serbia, and Bosnia — as well as producing work in Romania and Turkey.
Since 2010, he has lived and worked in Hong Kong, China, where his focus has turned to everyday life and minority communities. Serna’s work explores people’s relationships with one another and their environments, as well as the traces they leave upon the landscape.
Alongside his personal projects, he contributes regularly to both French and international publications. His photographs have been exhibited in solo and group shows across France, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
For inquiries, please contact info@bluelotus-gallery.com
