Francis Wu’s Hong Kong was a place of rickshaws, cadet pilots and a bustling harbor – a city still finding its shape in the middle of the last century. On the walls of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, his black-and-white photographs turn that half-remembered Hong Kong into something immediate and intimate.
As a young boy who settled in Hong Kong in the early 1930s, Wu grew into a photographer with a remarkably distinctive voice, folding the aesthetics of classical Chinese painting and literature into his work while keeping an unflinching eye on the city’s theater of thronging streets.
His portraits and street scenes are composed with great care and sensitivity to the subject, and are never contrived. Plumes of steam from food stalls, light cascading down stairwells, and the fleeting trace of a tram are carefully woven into his images. Together, they form a visual record of urban beauty and a city edging towards modernity, interlaced with steep, narrow stairways and densely packed side streets as the first high-rises begin to take shape.
The exhibition at the FCC reflects a rediscovery of Wu’s work. His photographs are held in the M+ collection alongside other landmark works that map Hong Kong’s visual culture. A replica of his studio will be incorporated into the new wing at the Hong Kong Museum of History, and many of his works will be on display. This rediscovery lifts Wu from the status of an “old Hong Kong” curiosity and places him firmly within the canon of artists who have helped define how the city sees itself.
In a city that moves quickly and sometimes forgets even faster, Francis Wu’s images show how people lived through periods of immense change: the dock workers and street vendors, the suited office clerks and sailors on shore leave, all moving through a landscape that shifts around them yet remains recognizably theirs.
The images and characters portrayed in Wu’s work slow Hong Kong down long enough for viewers to register the texture of everyday life, and to see how much of the city’s cultural history is carried by people who never make the headlines.
Bernard Charnwut Chan is the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District
