Photographs by Thierry Arensma

CITY VISION

About my work

I’ve already been in this city, it knows me. I was instantly taken aback by its might, energy, contrasts and paradoxes. It is intoxicating, astonishing. And also very tiring. This time, unlike on previous occasions, I am here with my 4×5 inch view camera and my boxes of out-of-date polaroids. Read more…

GALLERY

See the exhibition

A foreword by Robert Appleby

benefactor of the HK City Vision exhibition

My wife, Alex, and I arrived in Hong Kong in July 1997, the day before the Handover. We intended to stay for a short while but quickly started falling in love with the place, the people, the gritty, forced coalition of different creeds, colours, nationalities and types. Twenty years later, circumstance called us back to Europe.

We struggle to put into words our experiences and fond memories.

Thierry’s pictorial expressions; the grainy impressions of Hong Kong, past and present, the monochromatic medium touched with a hint of degraded earth colour, captures for us everything we find hard to explain. His composition is subtle and speaks to modern day Hong Kong, expressed in an archaic form.

We treasure his works as one might a keepsake. An enduring reminder of lives lived to the full and with no regrets!

Rob

The point of view of,

Elisa Martinelli, manager and curator at ArtMoorHouse London

It’s believed that an image is a sight which has been recreated, an appearance detached from the place and time in which it was first seen, and preserved - for a few moments or a few centuries. However it is the bond between the artist's and our own way of seeing that enables us to sense the place and time of an image. Thierry Arensma proposes a way to read Hong Kong which reflects the multitude of layers that are contained in the city itself. His artistic process combined with his gaze magically captures simultaneously the concept of space and the evolution of time leading us to sense a suspended, timeless, almost unreal city atmosphere…

Marie Deparis-Yafil, art critic

The “Honk Hong” series, completed during a voyage in 2010, instantly surprises due to the oblique path that it takes. The gaze that Thierry Arensma casts over the megalopolis offers an offbeat, utterly out-of-the-ordinary vision of the city. The point of view he adopts is an echo both of a very strong aesthetic bias, and a contemplation of the urban reality of a city nourished by its historic and architectural contrasts. At first sight, these photographs could be mistaken for enlargements of old photographs, quaint snapshots stumbled upon in Cat Street perhaps. We soon realise, however, that these are in fact recent pictures: different types of modern architecture, skyscrapers, given a “vintage” photographic aspect …