As its title implies, Hong Kong Waters, the most recent completed work by Berlin-based media artist Andreas M?ller-Pohle, represents an entirely new approach to depicting the essence of the city.
Working over a two-year period, M?ller-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: ‘… M?ller-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.’
www.riverproject.net
About the photographer Andreas M?ller-Pohle is a Berlin-based media artist and publisher. He studied at the Universities of Hanover and G?ttingen, and in 1979 founded European Photography, an independent art magazine for contemporary photography and new media. His first artistic projects from the late 1970s focused on issues of photographic perception, and later on photo recycling, now also incorporating video.
In his most recent works, he addresses the subject of water in portraits of the Danube River and Hong Kong. M?ller-Pohle’s works have been widely published and exhibited and are included in private and museum collections worldwide. As a publisher, M?ller-Pohle has edited the major works of the media philosopher Vil?m Flusser, available today in the 10-volume Edition Flusincluding the seminal Philosophy of Photography, which has been translated into over 20 languages.
In 2001, M?ller-Pohle was awarded the European Photography Prize from the Reind M De Vries Foundation. He is the author of numerous texts on photo theory and has been a visiting professor and lecturer at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. www.muellerpohle.net