More than One Reality: Photo Pictorial and the Making of Hong Kong Documentary Photography in the 1960s and 1970s
Scholarship on post-war Hong Kong photography has received less attention compared to cinema. This project addresses that gap by examining Photo Pictorial (攝影畫報 1964–2005), one of Hong Kong’s few dedicated photography magazine during the 1960s and 1970s, as a key site where documentary photography was constituted as both practice and institution. Prior to the 1960s, photography in Hong Kong was limited to the elite colonial circles, where photographers favored pictorialist salon aesthetics and rarely engaged with social realities. In the postwar decades, urban renewal cleared old neighborhoods, while an influx of mainland émigrés fleeing political turmoil created densely populated urban districts. These social and urban transformations, together with the Cultural Revolution, the 1967 leftist riots, reshaped the city’s political climate and compelled photographers to reconsider the potential of the medium.This project examines three aspects. First, the project examines how Photo Pictorial facilitated various documentary approaches to represent local social realities. The magazine’s photographers began turning their attentions to subjects overlooked by salon aesthetics, including overcrowded tenements and everyday street life. Mainland émigré photographers like Meng Minsheng (蒙敏生 1919-2007) and James Chung (鍾文略 1925-2018), as well as locally born photographers like Mak Fung (麥烽 1918-2009) and Yau Leung (邱良1941-1997), brought different perspectives shaped by their varied identities and positions within the city. Second, the study examines the magazine’s role in cultivating a growing community of local amateur photographers. Reflecting the rise of an urban middle class who could afford cameras, Photo Pictorial provided both technical instruction and aesthetic models, helping shape a generation of practitioners who contributed to documenting the changing urban landscape. It became a key platform where émigré photographers, local professionals, and self-taught amateurs could learn, exchange ideas, and make their work visible. Third, the project explores how the magazine worked as bridge between local practice and transnational networks. As the only photography magazine accessible to mainland readers in the 1970s, Photo Pictorial acted as a key conduit between Hong Kong and mainland China, while its circulation across Southeast Asia created the cultural exchanges that crossed Cold War boundaries. By utilizing archival research, oral histories, and visual analysis, this project argues that Photo Pictorial constituted a vision of what documentary photography could be in a city navigating urban transformation and political struggle.
Project Start Year: 2027, Principal Investigator(s): GUO, Qiuzi
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Vanished and Revived: Reimagining Kowloon Walled City Through Digital Storytelling in VR and AR
This digital cultural heritage project responds to the urgent need to document and reinterpret the rapidly changing landscape of Kowloon City District. Redevelopment schemes—such as the Nga Tsin Wai Road / Carpenter Road Development (KC-017)—are erasing long-standing shops, streetscapes, and architectural features, while symbolic acts like the reopening of Kai Tak Park evoke nostalgic reflections on the past.
Using digital and artistic methods, the project explores how memory, heritage, and identity are reshaped across disappearing and reappearing spaces. It will recreate selected sites through 3D modeling and virtual reality (VR), while specific cultural markers will be restored through augmented reality(AR), blending archival research with immersive storytelling.
This is a digitally driven cultural heritage project that investigates the shifting urban memory of Kowloon City District through immersive technologies. Combining spatial research with creative digital reconstruction, the project adopts 3D modeling, VR, and AR to document and reimagine sites threatened by redevelopment.
Project Start Year: 2025, Principal Investigator(s): GUO, Qiuzi
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Digital Heritage and Immersive Storytelling of Hong Kong’s Lost Landmarks in VR & AR
Project overview: This project focuses on preserving the cultural memory of Hong Kong’s disappearing shops and lost landmarks using Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). Many historic seafood shops, tea houses, and traditional markets in Kowloon City are expected to disappear within the next decade due to urban redevelopment. At the same time, many significant cultural landmarks across Hong Kong have already been lost. This project will use VR to digitally reconstruct old shops, allowing users to experience them as they once were, and AR to overlay lost landmarks onto their original locations, blending reality with digital history.Project Components
1. VR Reconstruction of Old Shops in Kowloon City
• Method: Use 3D scanning, photogrammetry, and archival research to create detailed VR environments of seafood shops, tea houses, and traditional markets.
• Experience: Users can virtually explore these historical shops, interact with objects, and listen to oral histories from shop owners.
2. AR Restoration of Hong Kong’s Lost Cultural Landmarks
• Method: Develop an AR application that overlays 3D models and archival images onto present-day locations.
• Experience: When users visit these locations, they can see the past structures overlaid in real-time using their smartphones.
3. Public Engagement and Knowledge Transfer
• Workshops & Exhibitions: Organize events to educate the public about Hong Kong’s disappearing cultural heritage and train students on 3D modeling and immersive storytelling.
• Collaboration: Partner with historians, urban planners, and community organizations to ensure historical accuracy and increase public impact.
• Online Platform: Create a web portal and mobile app where users can explore VR models and access historical materials.
Project Start Year: 2025, Principal Investigator(s): GUO, Qiuzi
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