Realms of Memory by Billy H.C. Kwok, Jay Lau, Lau Wai

The archiving impulse is one that attempts to trace, document, and make sense of the world. In response to the photographic archives of Hong Kong held by the University of Bristol and the University of Hong Kong, artists Billy H.C. Kwok, Jay Lau, and Lau Wai have developed new projects that interpret the archival stories of their home city, while revealing the gaps that exist. The works created explore how Hong Kong has always been a place of duality: both real and imagined, public and private, fact and fiction. This exhibition is produced by WMA, in collaboration with the Royal Photographic Society and the Hong Kong History Centre at the University of Bristol. 

Billy H.C. Kwok transforms basic visual art elements into a language for AI bots, using colour, composition, and perspective in photography as commands. Images generated by AI expand the photo archive of Tiger Balm Garden, a garden of great social and historical significance built in colonial Hong Kong during the 1930s. In this newly commissioned work, new characters and scenarios are introduced, at times animated, uncovering facts and establishing connections beyond our knowledge and imagination. Kwok’s back-and-forth communication with AI also points to the tug of war between the artist’s vision and AI’s self-taught abilities, the individual and the public attribution to big data, as well as the deviation from truth and illusion.

Lau Wai will present The Memories of Tomorrow (2018) which examines Hollywood’s often orientalist depiction of Hong Kong, from the 1950s to the present day. The work combines film stills alongside travel postcards, historical photographs and computer generated imagery, to reveal the tensions of a city held between both fiction and reality. 

Jay Lau grew up surrounded by memories, photographs and stories of old Hong Kong all of which occurred before he was born. Here, Lau has created woodblocks from overlooked, everyday images within the archives, such as building and construction work, and crowds of everyday citizens, and produced printed fabrics. He shows Hong Kong and its community always in flux, reflecting his own sense of detachment from its monumental histories, returning the digitally stored archival images to the physical realm.

In collaboration with