The Asia Society holds an exhibition Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence at the Chantal Miller Gallery of Asia Society.  My friends and I paid a visit on a leisurely Friday afternoon.

The Exhibition

Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence is currently open until 31^st July, 2022.

Recovery, Resilience, Resurgence features the work of three photographers, namely Hedda Morrison, Lee Fook Chee and Brian Brake.  Their old photographs depict life in Hong Kong spanning the few decades between 1946 and the 1970s.  From the end of WWII to the 1970s, Hong Kong has morphed from a war-torn British colony to a bustling city of industry and commerce, at the cusp of the economic takeoff of the 1980s.

The photographs present powerful images of Hong Kong that are both of the familiar and the unfamiliar.  The exceptional pace with which Hong Kong developed its city and its social progress comes through loud and clear.

Curator Edward Stokes

“Her Beijing photographs were better than her Hong Kong ones.”  Edward Stokes explains to the group that he is leading.  I could not help but to stop and listen to what he has to say.  The question is, did Hedda speak Cantonese and whether she interacted with her subjects.  Edward Stokes explains that she did not speak Cantonese.  She had also lived in Beijing for a much longer time and she spoke Mandarin, and the ability to engage meaningfully with her subjects was reflected on her Beijing photography.  Yet her Hong Kong photographs are also powerful in their own ways, especially her portraits of ordinary folks.

When they stopped to look at two excellent portraits, someone in the group asks, “how did people react to a photographer pointing a camera at them?”  Edward Stokes says that photographers had a way of handling unwelcoming gestures.  The photographers would start shooting without a film in their cameras.  They just kept pointing and pointing, and soon enough people figured that they were going to take their photographs anyway and would just ignore them.  Then they put in the cartridge and started taking the real shots.

Curator Edward Stokes impressed me as someone who has a real passion for the art, a trove of exceptional knowledge about the craft, and most importantly, a genuine appreciation of the photographers, whose hard work made possible the visual records of history and heritage.  Indeed, he himself is a photographer, and thus he is able to tell spirited stories and engaging analysis about these stills in the exhibition.  Please see further below Edward Stokes’ discovery of Lee Fook Chee and his photography.

Nostalgia for Old Hong Kong

This collection of photographs are in a somewhat chronological order.  Naturally, the older the time that they portray, the more interesting that they are.  For both Hedda Morrison and Lee Fook Chee, the photographs are all in black and white.  There are certainly many classic imageries of Hong Kong on display.  But many others bring to life a past that has long been forgotten.

Lee Fook Chee

Both of my favorite photographs in the exhibition were taken by Lee Fook Chee.  I liked his photographs because they convey the dynamics of old Hong Kong life. Still photos are perhaps not the best medium for capturing movements and sensualities, but Lee Fook Chee manages to do so with his Zeiss Ikonta.

While the other two photographers also have interesting life stories, I found the story of Lee Fook Chee to be particularly moving.  Unlike Hedda Morrison and Brian Brake, who were established photographers by the time they took these photographs in Hong Kong, Lee Fook Chee had a harsh life.  Photography was his means to earn a living, although he also did it with passion.

Born in Singapore in 1927, Lee Fook Chee was given up for adoption by his parents because they were too poor to raise him.  Although his adopted family was well-off, they eventually had their own children and therefore he was disfavored.  His adoptive father was a studio photographer himself.  He was unwilling to live a life of mundanity in Singapore, and made it to Hong Kong in 1947.

Lee was at first a seaman earning low wages.  In Hong Kong, he was unable to get work as a seaman and so he turned to a cousin who ran a studio.  He remained an independent photographer, mostly taking photographs of the tourists at the Peak, and selling his photographs there, to make a living.  His most prolific years were the 1950s.  However, times have advanced to a state where cameras were becoming popular and individually-owned.  In 1960s, Lee abandoned photography altogether, due to the fierce competition of photo-selling and taking at the Peak.

Yet, he preserved all the precious negatives of the photographs he took.  They were in mooncake tins.

During the 1960s, he ran a grocery store and sold ice-cream on a bicycle.  He had to give up his store when the government resumed the land in the 1980s.  In the 1990s, he noticed an emergent trend of nostalgia for old photos.  He set up a dark room in his own one-room public housing apartment to develop the prints from his 1950s negatives.  He then began selling those old photographs again at the Peak.  Edward Stokes, the curator, noticed him there in 2010, by the good hands of chance.

At this moment, tears welled in my eyes.

As a photographer himself, Edward Stokes formed an immediate bond with Lee Fook Chee.  Thus began a year-long conversation about Lee’s life, his passion and his photography.  They talked about publishing his photographs in a book.  That they did, eventually, but Lee Fook Chee died of a sudden illness in 2012, while the development of the book was still ongoing.

“Unsung in his lifetime, a photographer of Hong Kong.”

It was heartbreaking to read this, but at the very least, Lee knew that his work received proper recognition before he died.  What touched me especially was that his life, his fate, was so common as a Hong Konger in his generation.  Yet the burden of survival has not dulled his keen eye for photography, his love for Hong Kong and his pride as a craftsman of memories.  I saluted, to him, because he lived the very life that he photographed, and embraced every bit of joy and hardship of an era, now all but vanished.

Surely, the other two photographers had interesting life stories as well, and the exhibition has presented each of them fairly.  But I will not spoil them for you here.  The exhibition is worth a visit.

Some Thoughts

The period of Hong Kong on display at this exhibition is one that was neither experienced by us nor was it taught to us.  But my friends and I are the generation that grew up in colonial Hong Kong, having close ties with the generations of Hong Kong people that experienced war, displacement and poverty as portrayed in these photographs.  In fact, one of Hedda Morrison’s photographs portrays the Taikoo Dockyard in a postwar year.  My own grandfather worked at the dockyard when he just arrived in Hong Kong in 1946.  This photograph gave me the visual context for an experience that had significance in my grandparents’ life.

Sources

Descriptions on-site at the Asia Society.

How to Get There

The easiest way to the Asia Society is to go to Pacific Place.  Take the stairs up toward the High Court direction, but turning left at the end of the stairs, with High Court and Hong Kong Park on your right.  Then go along Supreme Court Road and head up Justice Drive at the roundabout.