HK:PM: Greg Girard’s Images of a Lost Hong Kong Light Up Victoria Harbour
Since early July, one of the world’s largest museum media screens has become a window into a vanished city.
Running nightly until September 28, on the vast M+ Facade in Hong Kong, HK:PM, is a moving-image project by Canadian photographer Greg Girard. Composed of animated photographs from Girard’s personal archive, the work offers a luminous, immersive portrait of Hong Kong during the late 20th century, a time of unprecedented transformation, known as the city's 'Golden Age'.
Located on the West Kowloon waterfront, the M+ Facade spans 65 metres tall by 110 metres wide, overlooking Victoria Harbour. Visible from Hong Kong Island and far beyond, it functions as a kind of monumental cinematic canvas: a public screen that blends architecture, moving image, and the city itself. Since M+ opened in 2021, the screen has hosted works by major international and local artists, but few resonate as intimately with the city’s history as Girard’s.
Though born and raised in Vancouver, it is Greg Girard’s depictions of East Asia—where he has spent much of his working life—for which he is best known, documenting the shifting face of some of the region’s largest metropolises. He first visited Hong Kong in 1974 and settled there in 1982, staying for over a decade during a pivotal period often referred to as the city’s “Golden Age.” The stock market had just been incorporated, wealth was booming, and a distinct visual culture was emerging: cosmopolitan, kinetic, and drenched in colour.
Girard photographed his new home day and night, capturing both the glitz and the grit: the frenetic energy of Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, the surreal density of the infamous, and now demolished, Kowloon Walled City, and the ever-present glow of neon signs. He documented nightclubs, back alleys, love hotels, airports, and waterfronts, often shooting long exposures on slide film that heightened the saturated hues and luminous atmosphere of the city at night.
In HK:PM, these still images are brought to life through careful animation. Street scenes blur with motion, neon signs flicker, aircraft descend between tower blocks, and beloved icons from the worlds of film and music reappear. The sequences unfold like a dream, poetic, haunting, beautiful. Many of the places Girard photographed have since vanished; others are barely recognisable.
In this context, the M+ Facade becomes more than just a screen. It acts as a vessel for memory: public, cinematic, and architectural. Girard’s vision of Hong Kong is not nostalgic in the conventional sense. It’s observant, moody, and alive with the contradictions of the era: anonymity and glamour, density and disconnection, speed and stillness.
HK:PM is on show nightly on M+ Facade until Sep 28.
Featured by:
