Urbanautica

Hong Kong 2047
by Quang Lam

portfolio special mention call 'EXTINCTION. THE WORLD WITHOUT US', 2019

Speaking about “Extinction” is not only about physical matters but also on what is defining us as social humanity within an economical and legal system. Hong Kong is a unique because of its location as a door for both capitalism and communism world. With its history and its economic power, it was and is in the avant-garde and a laboratory of what will happen in the near future. 2047 is the expiration date of the Basic Law which currently is giving the status of special administrative region (SAR) of China for 50 years. It ensures that Hong Kong will retain its capitalist economic system, legal system of people's rights and freedom. My project about “Hong-Kong 2047” started in 2014 with the Umbrella Protestation Movement, when for the first time people had been beginning to conscious of their near future. Currently in 2019, the violence has gradually rising as the “Extinction” date is becoming more and more apparent for the young generation. The images which is a part of the project have been taken in August 2019 during protestations. More than photo of people, I’m interested on how Urbanism and Architecture can reveal our humanity because they are planned and built to last for long term. So they are defining our future from our present time. Therefore these photos give us a glimpse of the world of 2047: Camera controls, Drone surveillance, Artificial Intelligent and Computerized Buildings, Air Pollution, Riots After the “Extinction” only Machines will remain.

Review by URBANAUTICA

Those taken by Quang Lam are some shots taken in the city of Hong Kong. He alternates some vertical portraits of grotesque skyscrapers, depicted almost as if they were totems, with close-up images of remote control and surveillance systems. The cold linear, anonymous, vanishing geometries of these buildings are a reflection of the modern city condition. In it, we read the canons and the characteristics of that chase to heaven, which is a challenge to eternity rather than to height. In the dense urban fabric of Hong Kong often cited by photographers, among all the late Michael Wolf, this form of constructive rationality is notoriously extreme. Here, the control of the land, contended historically until today, appears almost a translation of that infinite battle of saturation of the world. As inclusive totalitarianism from which one cannot escape. And this is why another form of control creeps into the city. Behind the technological devices that register and file citizens, behind this instrumentalization of the more or less induced need for security, there is a structure dedicated to monitoring the dynamics of infinite growth. A paradigm that appears as paradoxical as the concept of world order, which forces all peoples into a new form of imprisonment. In this sense, it is useful to quote Michel Foucalt in Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975). A prison is somehow a new form of technological power with its own language, not just verbal. Like the prison told by John Carpenter in 1981 in the science fiction action film "Escape from New York", in which the island of Manhattan in 1997 became the prison/theater of society's outcasts. Similarly, the Quang Lam series is a vision projected in 2047, in a dystopian environment dominated by camera controls, drone surveillance, artificial intelligence, computerized buildings, air pollution. In this scenario of asphalt, concrete, and glass, the last losers of globalization move like heroes of an elusive resistance. Somehow these images photograph an urban condition rather than a city itself. They are so damned topical!