a note of intent

I am born and raised in Hong Kong, a city which had been formed out of a violent collision between the need to house the millions, and the mountains and seas that dominate the territory. The remnants of these ongoing clashes are visible at all levels - built or natural, grand or intimate. When concrete is poured over granite, and the saline air fractures the steel rebars, the concrete exposes and morphs into the rock – until one can no longer draw a line between the ‘natural’ and the ‘civilized’. And that, I think, defines the intrinsic qualities of my home-land.

My curiosity particularly lies in exploring the notion of the keloid – the overcompensated scar tissue in a bodily attempt to repair a wound. Thus a keloid does not come naturally – an aftermath by nature, it is neither natural nor manmade, but a product of the constant clashes and interactions between both. This became the origins of my photography project Whispers From A South, where I have been documenting the liminal spaces of Hong Kong. In the process I have come to realize that the topography haunts not only the built environment, but also profoundly shapes the perception and life of a nation on a subconscious level.

For me, the partial nature of the medium of photography represents an opportunity for me to scavenge fragments of space and memory, extracting meaning from the giant montage of everyday life. In the words of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri, I try to present my photographic work as a ‘sum of fragmentary hieroglyphs’: “there is the urge to find a cipher, a structure of every single image which in its totality defines something else.”

On the other hand, architecture and urbanism represent to me a synthesis moment of these fragmentary memories. This is evident when I have led the design and construction work of Project Tombolo, co-founded with my peers at school in 2018. On the southernmost island in Hong Kong we have built a private pavilion and a waterfront retaining structure from 2020 to 2022, volunteering activities from which we were able to work closely with villagers while understanding deeply their needs and heritage. The experience had made visible to me an alternative form of architecture as a discipline: instead of an act of conquest, it is an effort to form a symbiotic relationship between civilization and nature through a territorial and ethnographic approach. To build with careful material choices and detailing under the harsh climate on the island while exploring the relationship between climatic conditions and the genius loci of the place – the experience had a profound impact for my take towards architecture and urban design.

Home-land is in a constant flux albeit being experienced every day, especially under contemporary conditions of volatility and mass displacement. Since moving out of my home country, I have been reflecting for two years, from a distance, how the differences in sociopolitical systems and climatic conditions have shaped our lived environments in such diverse trajectories. Inspired by my upbringing, I am engaged in the pursuit of gathering keloids across lands and nations, and ultimately to extract ethnographic connections between communities, dwellings, and the soil from which they have risen.

Hin Fung Sherman Lam