Wong Wo Bik

Wong Wo Bik is a fine arts photographer and one of the few active female photographers in Hong Kong. She is best known for her photographic documentation of buildings and architecture with historical and cultural significance in Hong Kong. Her work also involves artistic manipulations, as these photographs retell her experience and stories at the sites. In 2013, she received an award from the Hong Kong Women Excellence in the Six Arts, Hong Kong Federation of Women. Wong also has a long and active career as a curator, researcher and art educator. She currently lives and works in Hong Kong.

Life as a photographer

History and memory She began her photography career in the 1980s, capturing photographs of historical architecture and landscapes in Hong Kong. Instead of preserved heritage buildings, she is interested in exploring old buildings that may be destroyed or demolished as time goes by. Her works are not just a historical record of old buildings but a reflection of her own experience "vanquishing time and space" at the site. She tries to use art as a way for her to express and shed perspective on these various destinations because she believes that the architecture she sees around the streets of Hong Kong reveals stories about the people who lived there. Through artistic fabrications, by only setting up two lights and flaw angles, she attempts to reinvent and retell these stories as well as her own subjective narrative of her experiences during her exploration at the site.

Directional photography Wong becomes interested in the missing images after one of her friends told her that she remembers seeing a family photo taken back in the 1930s but had been lost. Photography, to her, is not an instrument of memory but also a tool for the invention of memory. At the Woman Wanted exhibition at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, she display the photograph reconstructed by her in a way that she recruits her friends to simulate the original in the 1930s. She also create the Polaroid series to simulate crime scene in a still frame in a way that mimic thriller film. 2017 City of Exchange: Liverpool/Hong Kong, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK, as part of the Liverpool International Photography Festival

Group exhibitions 1978: East Coast Consortium, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, USA

Publications

Wong Wo Bik (1983). Color & Consent. Polaroid Far East (HK) Limited.