shashasha

As its title implies, Hong Kong Waters, the most recent completed work by Berlin-based media artist Andreas Müller-Pohle, represents an entirely new approach to depicting the essence of the city.

Working over a two-year period, Müller-Pohle captured Hong Kong in photographs and video from the perspective of its surrounding waters – half below and half above the water’s surface. The result is a fresh, hitherto unseen depiction of an Asian megalopolis.

It is often forgotten that Hong Kong is not solely defined by its hyper-dense high-rise architecture; its waterscapes are equally multifaceted, with more than 700 kilometres of coastline and 260 islands, dotted with numerous ports, canals, rivers and freshwater reservoirs. Hong Kong Waters brings these two dimensions together – the verticality of architecture and the horizontality of the water.

As Oscar Ho describes in his introduction: ‘… Müller-Pohle manages to show the complex personalities of this seaside city, and leads the viewer from the dense, concrete forest of the high-rises of Central, across the exotic Hollywood seascape of Aberdeen, to the wilderness of the remote islands unknown to most.’