restricted/guided/tethered and neatly stacked –
Mapping Hong Kong's Bet on Greed
Like several other projects made before this one positions again the artist book as final exclusive form of representation for this body of work, instead of framed images at walls. From the earliest beginning I photographed the complete series with growing chapters of the book in mind. The book uses different paper types to correspond to different layers of content, like open natural, coated or even high glossy lacquered paper. As well the sequencing of the images appears to respond to different structures of narration. The shown reproductions of spread pages do not represent the important haptic impression of the real object. So the published book is to be seen as the final piece of art.
In January 2016, the city of Hong Kong has been named within the last sixth consecutive years by the American Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal to be the "freest economy" in the world. This fact alone should be evident enough, even for sensible finding topics of my stay there. But beyond that, today the Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China is in a developed mode for a "field trial" to original Chinese future interests. And so it became at the same time a unique "neoliberal research laboratory“ and this is certified to be at a pathological state. It can attribute Hong Kong to be a role model for the coming near future, in which the supremacy of global power interests is renegotiated. Seen from this point of view Hong Kong today is in a comparable state like Berlin was in the 1980ties.
The Book has been published with 272 pages at www.spectorbooks.com in June 2019 and is available within the ISBN 978-3-95905-162-0 and the above named title at your local book store.
1. Canton Diary
2. Plato’s Cave
3. Ballet of Trolleys, Bags and Capsules
4. A Heart of Gold
5. Restricted/Guided/Tethered and Neatly Stacked
6. Dystopian Confusion
7. Appropriation Nature
A limited artist edition of this book is available directly from me. In an edition of 20 plus 5 a.p. the book comes with a 21x30cm Hahnemühle pigment ink print, together with a hand bound german text transcription packed in a typical Hong Kong document bag. Some few editions are still available for 150 EUR plus tax and shipping through mail order to my address. The edition can be seen as last image in this section.