Laundry Art

Dry the clothes have initially been the most common thing in daily life. Walk around Hong Kong’s public housing blocks and old tenement buildings today, and it quickly becomes clear that many residents still hang their clothes outside to dry.

Since November 2017 I’ve been walking around Hong Kong looking at the “landscape.” Inspired by Bernd and Hilla Becher, two of the most famous deadpan photographers in history. I have been trying to create an image that can offer a different perspective on laundry object, public space, and narrow city there are many conflicts. In the "laundry art" series, the photographs are neither landscapes nor documentation, but a hybrid of the two.

The photographs showed the balance and harmony of the composition and the use of light to dramatize or underplay the scenery; they are devoid of emotion. The clothes drying can be seen everywhere in Hong Kong public space. I believe that photography does play a role with how we think and how we imagine Hong Kong people to live in our society, so I have been trying to bring together two elements which seem opposed into one picture although these photographs may appear surreal, they are actual documentation of use of laundry from Hong Kong public space. I think that there’s more to say about how I represent the people live in this small city. They document a soon-to-disappear cityscape in a formalistic manner as much akin to industrial archeology as art.

I am drawn to society’s in-between spaces and grey areas such as the way of laundry. When we look at the laundry from a different perspective, citizens respond to their own needs and discover, create and utilize the public spaces that belong to them. Some people carry their clotheslines by skillfully using ropes and lamp posts, or ingenious use of the environment. The characteristics of a city are not shaped by urban designers deliberately. It is inadvertently adding vitality to public spaces.