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Shall We Laugh
By Madeleine Marie Slavick
Michael Wolf dedicates one of his photography books to his mother, who brought him, as a German boy growing up in Georgia and California, to flea markets around the city.
I can imagine them looking at each object-shape, the way it sits with itself, the way the edges happen, how the patina renders a sense of mood and time, and each object’s placement, importance, among the other second-hand things, wanted, unwanted, known, unknown, spread across low tables and sidewalks.
Too, it is my German-American mother I am thinking of. She and I have the same tendency to wordlessly assess, prefer the worn to the gloss, the used to the new, and when we walk anywhere together, we like to find ways to laugh.
In HONG KONG BACK DOOR, an exhibition of eighteen photographs taken in the back streets of Hong Kong, I can almost hear Michael Wolf say, eighteen times, ‘Look, Mom, (or maybe he says Mutti to her), I found another one.’
I can almost hear them laugh.
I am not sure why.
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Photographed in 2002 and 2003, HONG KONG BACK DOOR is Michael’s first personal body of work after many years of editorial assignments. His credits since include exhibitions in Chicago (Museum of Contemporary Photography, where he was artist-in-residence), Shanghai (Shanghai Biennale), Paris (Colette Gallery), and San Francisco (Robert Koch Gallery). His work has also been published by Steidl, Taschen, Thames & Hudson, and in major international magazines such as National Geographic.
The everyday objects portrayed in HONG KONG BACK DOOR are seemingly lost, random, abandoned, left outside for all to see, yet are found, claimed, and affirmed through Michael’s lens. Sometimes, the objects become more than themselves — ourselves.
Michael sees his chosen objects as already being works of art, comparing them to the Dadaist readymades of Marcel Duchamp and the abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock. He follows in the steps of three of his role models, documentary photographers Eugene Atget, August Sander and Walker Evans, who also evoked humanity through portrayals of the inanimate.
Michael says that many Hong Kong people are ‘ashamed’ of the objects in his photographs because the objects expose the underbelly of the city, the reality behind the façade, life at the ‘back door’ of their society, a society full of disparity. In Hong Kong, one in every six people lives in poverty, and the gap between the rich and poor is one of the widest in the world.
Lumenvisum is the first gallery in Hong Kong to properly exhibit HONG KONG BACK DOOR – the only previous screening lasted for just one evening.
Viewers from Mainland China, too, do not always want to see what Michael presents. When he exhibited a similar series of images featuring chairs which he calls ‘bastard chairs’, a Chinese designer complained that 'exhibiting these images of goddamn broken chairs is scandalous; it makes China look so backward.' Of course, poverty is the ‘scandal’ and hiding it even more so.
The same book that Michael dedicated to his mother is also for his father, from whom he learned that ‘it is important on occasion to be stubborn and see things through to the end.’
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Michael moved to Hong Kong about fifteen years ago, when he was in his early forties. He wanted a change from Germany, where he was born in 1954, and the United States, where he was raised. In Hong Kong, he has photographed ‘lost laundry’ in public spaces, round-edged apartment buildings he calls ‘corner houses’, skyless panoramas of high-rises in ‘architecture in density’, and residents in the city’s first public housing complex in which homes measure just ‘100 x 100’ feet. He gravitates to the older neighborhoods in populated urban areas, where the aesthetic is dense and idiosyncratic: in his words, a ‘visual chaos’.
‘Hong Kong is almost like a plant,’ he says, ‘it grows organically, making space for itself wherever possible.’
Yet there is always order in Michael’s images.
And a sense of loneliness.
Michael’s eye veers to the grey – concrete, cement, stucco, metal, cloud, smog – often punctuated with red or pink, which feel like bits of found joy to hold onto. A pink face towel clings to the end of a drainage pipe. Two pink cotton gloves dry next to a salted fish. The ubiquitous red plastic bag stuffs into a criss-cross grid. Four take-away paper cups, with straws, jam into a chain-link fence. A sole plastic strip falls through the small sky of an alley.
His images feel singular, even the groups of objects. Nine heads of gai-choi (mustard greens) droop together. Two propped-up mops alone as one. Work gloves form one curl along the spiral of barbed wire.
Michael studies as he collects, his gaze meticulous, consistent, formal. His object is artifact, centrally placed, plain spoken.
How does humor occur?
And lyricism?
The title image for the exhibition is a still life all its lyrical own: a pink-flowered towel-blanket, almost happy, clipped onto a fence in glory, yet fearing a fall. A little ridge of high-rise homes runs along the fabric-horizon, and above, soft clouds.
The bonus image, available in a limited edition as a means to support Lumenvisum, is another image that stands best on its own, this time for its humor, black: four oily geese, plucked and skewered, roasted, long beaks opened, sound stopped.
Maybe Michael is laughing.
Maybe our mothers are.
Although air is grey again.
As I leave the exhibition, I write in the guestbook, ‘lonely and grey, then some humor, now a door, the back one.’ I open it.
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