Jeremy Cheung’s Hong Kong Déjà Vu: When Reality Feels Unreal

Description

Through his multiple exposure works shot in Hong Kong, Jeremy Cheung seeks to evoke a kind of déjà vu for his audience – a feeling that brings into question the nature of reality and even the flow of time, as if the reality ceases to be real.

Instead of steering the viewer’s attention to specific subjects, as in conventional street photography, Cheung’s series decomposes the city into abstract visual elements, such as form, nature, texture, the contrast between old and new, direction, and relation. It inspires closer inspection of the whole we have come to accept as reality. The photographer also compresses time in his works through multiple exposures, compressing seconds and years into a single frame. The recombination of these elements gives rise to this series.

Looking at Cheung’s dreamlike creations, viewers contemplate which is more intriguing: the surreal photos combined of the mixed elements or the actual intricate Hong Kong we too used to seeing?