A Visual Journey Through Pascal Greco’s Hong Kong

Iker Gil: You photographed Hong Kong for over ten years, which has resulted in three photobooks to date: Hong Kong: Perspectives, Prospectives, Typologies; Hong Kong Neon; and Kwai Shing West Estate. How did you become interested in Hong Kong?

Pascal Greco: My interest in Hong Kong came from watching Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love in the early 2000s, and later 2046 by the same director. In the first film, I was charmed by the streets we discover on screen; in the second, it was the neon lights that inspired me.

IG: Your first book, Hong Kong: Perspectives, Prospectives, Typologies, focused on the city’s architectural typologies. In some images we appreciate the repetition and scale of the skyscrapers, while in others we can make out the rooftops and ground floors of small buildings. Could you talk about the choice of buildings and the contrast between the types you selected?

PG: For this project on Hong Kong’s rich and varied architectural typologies, I covered the entire city over five years (2012–2017), spending roughly a month each year. One part focuses on the famous rounded-corner buildings in Kowloon that date back to the British colonial era. Another part features rooftops, also in Kowloon. These are mostly older, low-rise buildings where everyone can access the roofs, and, as Hong Kong had for years the most expensive square meter in the world, many residents—mainly immigrants without the income needed to rent an apartment—settled on rooftops, first with makeshift shacks and later with much sturdier structures. It’s illegal to live on rooftops, but the government tolerates it, as it means fewer people potentially living on the streets in plain sight.

IG: The black and white photographs of Hong Kong were taken with a camera (Polaroid 600SE) and film (Polaroid Type 100) that are no longer produced, and with a single 127 mm lens. I’d like to know more about how those two self-imposed constraints influenced the outcome of the series.

PG: First, there hadn’t yet been a black and white architectural project about the city—Hong Kong’s very colorful buildings naturally call for color. Then I chose to use the Polaroid camera for its quality: it uses Type 100 Polaroid film, which hasn’t been made for years, and has a much higher quality than the Polaroids known by the general public. I also love the idea that the viewer has to, in a way, dive into the photograph because it’s small—8.5 cm by 10.6 cm—whereas architectural photography is usually large format, mainly shot with a view camera. I also like the constraint of using just one lens: it gives the work a consistency and forces me to move—to discover more—in order to find the best angle.

IG: For your second book, Hong Kong Neon, you moved away from building typologies to focus on neon signs—an essential part of the city’s visual identity that has almost disappeared over the last fifteen years. The way the photographs are made completely isolates the sign from its context. What drew you to neon signs, and how did you approach photographing them in context or at scale?

PG: Wong Kar-wai’s films, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell—various influences made me love and appreciate Hong Kong’s neon signs. Their light, with the different gases inside the glass tubes, is truly unique and quite sensual.

IG: Were there particular neighborhoods or types of buildings where you found the most interesting neon signs?

PG: Mainly in the Kowloon area, because there were so many there, offering a wide variety of typologies and designs from one sign to another.

IG: Why have they disappeared?

PG: After Hong Kong was handed back to China at the end of the 1990s, the city introduced a law in the early 2000s requiring signs over 2.5 meters to be removed for safety reasons, due to the many typhoons. Others say it’s because the neon signs are all in traditional Chinese, which is closely associated with Hong Kong and Taiwan, whereas mainland Chinese use simplified Chinese.

IG: In the book and the accompanying film that you directed about the neon signs, you give us a glimpse of the craft behind making a neon sign by interviewing Master Wu Chi-kai. How did you meet him, and what interested you about his work?

PG: I was looking to interview and film one of the last master glassblowers who make neon signs. There aren’t many left—there’s little work now that new signs are made with LEDs, and others have retired. During my many stays I met locals committed to preserving neon signs—something the authorities weren’t interested in. Thanks to some of them, I was able to get in touch with Master Wu, interview him, and film him.

IG: For your third Hong Kong book, you return to an architectural subject, this time the Kwai Shing West Estate, a housing complex that turns 50 this year. What prompted you to explore this complex in particular?

PG: In my first project and book on Hong Kong architecture, I explored several unusual buildings, but when I discovered Kwai Shing West Estate it struck me for two reasons. First, it was built on a hillside, which means the ten buildings are arranged at different levels of the slope. This makes its construction—and the way nature and rock are re-appropriated for the built environment—very interesting. I’m very drawn to the mineral element, which appears repeatedly in this complex of ten buildings.

The second reason is that I am particularly fond of the two elevator exits that look like UFOs and allow you to pass and ascend from one building to another. There is a second, similar complex in Hong Kong, but it doesn’t have those elevators with such unusual architecture.

IG: It is interesting that the first part of the book focuses on the estate’s ground conditions—the natural and man-made elements that physically support this large-scale complex—without ever showing the buildings. Sometimes the images present abstract geometric forms, while others highlight the site’s extreme topography. What interested you in these ground conditions?

PG: It’s precisely the re-appropriation of nature, rock, and the mineral elements by humans—and how humans exploit or take advantage of it, if there is any advantage—in order to build. Hong Kong is truly unique for the terrain conditions it offers.

IG: Although the Kwai Shing West Estate houses up to 18,000 people, we don’t see people in your photographs—only traces of life, like laundry hanging from windows. Could you explain your choice to photograph the complex without people?

PG: When I went there to shoot my film and take photos, it was often at night, and I felt a pronounced sense of solitude that I wanted to convey in the images. That is why there are no people. Despite the fact that these estates were built to meet most residents’ needs and desires (there are two schools, a dentist, restaurants, shops, groceries, etc.) and to create social ties (there are playgrounds for children, basketball courts, exercise areas and machines), it is clear that people are increasingly individualistic. I felt that despite those efforts and the 1970s ideas behind the design there wasn’t a real sense of community, apart from among older people, and not very much even there. As a result, I found the complex not very lively compared to the number of inhabitants, which is around 16,000 to 18,000.

IG: You photographed the building by day and by night, with distinct but equally interesting results. Could you tell us more about what interested you in these two lighting conditions?

PG: The daytime photographs are divided into two categories. In the first part of the book, I wanted images in which you consistently find a piece of the hillside—either the rock or the concrete that covers it. The second daytime part consists of aerial photographs I took with a drone, because I thought it would be interesting to gain height to see the entire complex and its integration into the landscape. I love the particular atmosphere that reigns at night in this type of estate. And the artificial light, from streetlamps and from the apartments, has a color that is unique and specific to Hong Kong.

IG: Are there photographers who have documented Hong Kong or the built environment of other cities whose work particularly interests you?

PG: I discovered Michael Wolf’s work on Hong Kong fifteen years ago in a gallery in Shanghai while I was making my book SEOUL SHANGHAI TOKYO. He was the first to make sublime large-format views of Hong Kong: photographs of colorful, dense façades with no vanishing point for the eye. Joël Tettamanti, a Cameroon-born, Switzerland-based photographer also inspired my work through his way of photographing and covering much lesser-known regions.

IG: You made films related to the books Hong Kong Neon and Kwai Shing West Estate. What is your relationship to cinema and how do these two media help you tell stories in different ways?

PG: I started with cinema; I came to photography later. I find that cinema elicits more emotion than a photograph—because the image moves, because there is sound and noise—and it becomes even more powerful when music joins the moving images. In my work, doing both a photographic project and a film on the same topic lets me create two different but highly complementary bodies of work, offering two ways of approaching the same subject, two different atmospheres, two distinct treatments that complement each other.

IG: Will there be another book on Hong Kong? If not, what’s next?

PG: I think I’ve covered Hong Kong with three books and two films, including STUN, made with the dancer Stefania Cazzato. Since last year I’ve been working on a film about a housing complex in Tokyo, a project that is currently in development.