Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest: Gareth Brown’s Dance with Hong Kong

A defiant female form stands menacingly firm, arms outstretched, trailing an unspooling roll of blood-red fabric on a rocky outcrop off Cape D’Aguilar Battery, a World War II fort at the southernmost tip of Hong Kong island. An acrobatic aerialist hangs in a submissive foetal position, clinically bisected by black silk, swinging from a walltree woven into the concrete of Wan Chai. A naked couple plead with one another across elevations, amid the cold construct of the Zaha Hadid-designed Innovation Tower, at PolyU.

These are some of the striking images that make up photographer Gareth Brown’s first solo show in 15 years – a powerful survey of Hong Kong’s totemic topography, each image ornamented by dance performers, captured in dramatic stances and blurred frenzy. If photography is a time machine, and dance is physical poetry, then Brown’s Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest might be described as fleeting visual vignettes of emotional landscapes.

“The documentary [approach] was always boring for me,” says Brown. Placing human forms in the frame enlivened and contextualised the location, offering a commentary on the moments and memories of a rapidly changing city. “I wanted to create with layers and depth. I wanted to use dance to help me tell the stories of the places that I was viewing,” he adds, surveying his work as it hangs on the walls of the main bar of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club on Lower Albert Road.

“House of Convenience” in Tai O, featuring Irene Lo

Owing the narrative

The project began nearly two decades ago, when Brown was invited to photograph Faye Leung, then senior principal at Hong Kong Ballet and one of the most famous dancers in Hong Kong. Rather capturing a pretty pose in a controlled performance space, Brown shot the beloved leading lady — in wide angle and mellow 6am light — off the coast on a concrete pedestal supporting the Island Eastern Corridor; feats of physical and engineering strength in concert.

After completing five more shoots in the series, Brown was invited by a large property group to stage the results in a sponsored exhibition. With it came the obligation of promotion. “I had to give interviews to 10 to 12 magazines. I was on TV, I was on the radio. You got in a taxi and they used to have this little TV, and there I was – you couldn’t escape from me,” remembers Brown, a commercial photographer by trade. “So all of a sudden, I was on this roller coaster, this world of PR, and it was a real dance with the devil.”

And a midnight soul-selling at the crossroads was not what he had in mind. “I came out of it thinking, wow, well, lots of people know me. I’m out there,” he says. “But at the same time, I’d set this project up because I wanted to rediscover my passion for photography, and I wanted to be out of the commercial world. I didn’t want that. So I withdrew.”

But he didn’t stop the project. Over the past 15 years, Brown has continued to explore the concept, deliberately out of the spotlight, as a form of self-prescribed therapy. “My art was my sanity project. When I felt pressured or had difficulty in commercial life or even family life, then I would work on the art,” he says. He went on to shoot more than 40 different collections, each based on a different location and subject: Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest brings together a single image from 32 of these shoots.

“I really wanted the purity of producing stuff for myself, and for the dance community, and not worry too much about other stuff,” says Brown. “Now I’ve got to the point where, actually, I need to get this stuff out of here. Because I feel good about it.”

Changing with the times

In one of Brown’s most powerful images, site-specific performer Christine He appears primordial and possessed, braying in pain amid the coastal ruins of Wu Kai Sha, a rural village now enveloped by skyscrapers. Elsewhere, Laura Pan Lingjuan, former principal dancer of Hong Kong Dance Company, reclines on the bare wood of a deteriorating extension to the historic Grade II listed Shek Lo Mansion. 

“Sometimes it’s not easy to recruit the dancers, because it’s a little bit dangerous,” says Brown. “These are incredibly professional sports people, really – and if they turn their ankle, I’m going to get killed.” Yet he had no problem coercing a quintet of athletes from the Hong Kong Artistic Swimming Team to hike for half a day to be photographed in the rock pools of Sai Kung’s Sheung Luk stream.

An overt theme of temporality runs through the collection – perhaps because Brown arrived in 1996, the final days of colonial Hong Kong, and quickly found himself fascinated by a city in the throes of transformation. He earned a living teaching English, in the pre-Internet age. “It occurred to me how little Hong Kong people knew about Hong Kong,” he recalls. “My students had no idea. They would spend their weekends in shopping malls. I was going to see places, talking about them in my classes. So I thought, well, I’ve got to shoot Hong Kong – I’ve got to show people what Hong Kong is.”

“Island Eastern Corridor” featuring Faye Leung

Distilling motion 

Symbolism is never far from the frame. In a noirish snapshot, contemporary dancer Alina Lee artfully contorts above the single-lane traffic flow of Garden Road. B-boy legend Fishball had to wear gloves to strike power moves on the still-warm ground of Kai Tak Airport Fire Station, a week after it mysteriously burned down in 2008 – “almost like a phoenix dancing on the ashes,” says Brown.

Amid the roots of the massive banyan holding up the Kam Tim Tree House, acclaimed contemporary performer and choreographer Abby Chan “transformed herself into a little yellow bird of knowledge,” says Brown, in a symbolic lament for Hong Kong’s rapid pace of change. In a blatant and beguiling case of digital sorcery, around a dozen figures appear dotted around the unique cylindrical walkways of Lai Tak Tsuen; they are all contemporary dancer and aerialist MayMay Leong, playing out an ascent from heaven to hell. 

“In the advertising world, you get pushed and pulled and everything is controlled and has to be perfect,” says Brown. “There’s not so much interpretation. “So for me as a photographer, my personal work is my voice.”

In one image, Brown poignantly photographed Hong Kong Ballet associate director and former dancer Irene Lo on the outskirts of Tai O, in front of the House of Convenience, a refuge built for dying patients to pass their final days. “When we first saw it, it was being used by the council to store their rubbish in,” remembers Brown. “It’s going to fall down, and it’s really sad because you go to Tai O and they care so much about heritage and they’ve got this building, which is basically where people went to pass, and it’s not being protected. It’s just bloody madness. How can we not care for this building?”

“Lok Wah” featuring Evains Lui

Clicking ahead

Despite keeping these images largely private for the past 15 years, Brown is only now cautiously sharing them with the world. While he may have been ahead of the curve, he was late to the party – there may now be a growing trend for shooting dancers on location, but Brown focuses his lens where his true passions lie. 

“The interesting thing is actually that there’s now lots of people [shooting dance],” he admits. “But their approach is different. The dance is very much the focus. For me, it’s the location. So we must never lose sight of that. The dancers are there to bring context to the location.”

Looking ahead, Brown is considering splitting his existing work into three larger collections, tentatively themed Heritage, Modernity and Natural World, for future shows, and is considering compiling the best of the 300-odd images he’s fully produced into a book.

“I think for me, as a commercial photographer, when I mix with fine artists, conceptual artists, sometimes I feel insecure or taken aback,” he says. “I’ve got imposter syndrome,” he adds. “Other people have said, Gareth, you’ve just got to get this chip off your shoulder. You’ve got to show it.”

Bodies in Motion, Bodies at Rest, is on display at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club until October 31, 2025. Entry is restricted to FCC members and their guests.  Some private visits with Gareth Brown may be available upon request; contact us here for more information.

All photography in this article is by Gareth Brown.