So Long Hong Kong, So Long

Since January of 2021, there has been a minimum of three flights every day fully loaded with Hongkongers, leaving Hong Kong for the UK. It is expected that 250,000 to 320,000 Hong Kong residents will immigrate to the UK in the next five years.

This mass migration wave is a consequence of the anti-government protests in 2019 and the increasing threat from the mainland Chinese government.

‘This is no longer the city I once knew.’

In the mind of these people, they are leaving Hong Kong permanently, with the risk of never being able to go back.

I was one of the people on those planes. I was leaving the city that I loved for my whole life with the feelings of perplexity and depression of leaving my family, friends, and career behind.

All the photographs in SO LONG HONG KONG, SO LONG were taken during the time of such a dramatic change to the city of Hong Kong between 2020 and 2021.

In the beginning, I see this work as my farewell letter to Hong Kong, and also to the first half of my life.

But when I continued developing this body of work, I kept asking questions to myself. What made me follow my parents' footsteps forty years ago, was to escape from socialist China once again. What is the force behind all these? Pushing people away from their homelands. What is this modern migration wave means to a place, to a clan, to a family, and to a man? I realized this work is more than personal, and it is also a conversation about the complexity of Hong Kongers' identity and cultural roots.

By displaying the sense of change in Hong Kong, in terms of time and emotions. These images show a certain kind of atmosphere in the city right now after the failure of the democratic movement in 2019. An undeniable sense of complexity, powerlessness, uncertainty, fate, hesitation, and the loss of hope.

I would like to use this work to share these thoughts with the world, and to the audience who care about Hong Kong, and care about the people who are still there and those who came from there.

After all, I always felt I was only telling the first half of the whole story. So what is next? What is the second half of this story? Do those people who have left found their homeland, their promised land, on this other side of the world? What if they haven't? What if they've failed?