BY SHEUNG YIU
© Johnny Gin, Untitled, 2014, from the series ‘The Architecture of Insurgency’
Photography is arguably one of the best documenting tools. Not long after the invention of photography, artists went out on the streets and journalists dived into war zones to bring scenes of leisure and destruction to viewers, metaphorically freezing fleeting moments for further examination.
During Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, a rare civil disobedience in Hong Kong demanding the universal suffrage of the city’s leader, protestors built barricades with found objects around the three occupying sites in order to fend off police’s siteclearings.
Johnny Gin, seeing these barricades as ‘a type of vernacular expression arising from protest culture’, began documenting the ephemeral structure of protestor’s ideological struggle and creativity in his series ‘Architecture of Insurgency’. In the statement of this project, he wrote ‘Set against a backdrop of Government buildings and monolithic office towers, this somewhat “nostalgic” mode of resistance encircled a singular “privatized public” space, underscoring the dialectical relationship between traditional power structures and their subversive counterparts.’
This barricades are not technically the traditional architecture that you photographed, Why do you decide to turn your lens towards these barricades?
I work in Central near the protest site, and I started going there at lunch two or three times a week to observe all the activities and look at the protestinspired street art that was sprouting up all over the area. I noticed all the barricades that were erected within the protest zone and how they changed every time I visited. As someone who is interested in architecture and in particular urban spaces, I began to view them as vernacular architectural expressions because they were spontaneous and constructed with local materials to meet very specific needs.
Even when there was talk about saving all the protest art, I knew that the barricades once dismantled could never be reconstructed elsewhere. I was compelled to undertake this project not only as a typological documentation of these transient structures, but also as a photographic examination of the power struggle between the established authorities and the insurgents as expressed through the spatial and environmental relations.
© Johnny Gin, Untitled, 2014, from the series ‘The Architecture of Insurgency’
How does these temporary ‘architecture’ during the movement change your view on architecture and/or your older projects?
The rural vernacular architecture that I normally photograph is usually set against a picturesque backdrop of trees and mountains. Here the barricades are framed against the imposing background of highway infrastructure, Government buildings and towering monoliths of steel and glass—the concentration of money and power in the heart of the financial district. This current project is a bit more conceptual in that by photographing the barricades within this context, and in relation to the repurposed landscape, I hope to reveal them as intermediaries in the struggle. I photographed the barricades in the same manner as I would any architectural subject, with a straight on, formal composition under neutral lighting conditions. I wanted to describe them in great detail but with a disciplined sensibility. In that regard, I haven’t veered dramatically from my other projects.
How do you feel participating in the movement as a photographer? What did you see? What is your story?
The Occupy Movement is probably one of the largest social movements in the history of Hong Kong and also one of the most massively documented events. We have already seen many great images and projects inspired by the Movement that convey the aspirations and struggles of the proletariat. I hope that my project can add to that conversation and perhaps inflect a new and different understanding of the narrative.
© Johnny Gin, Untitled, 2014, from the series ‘The Architecture of Insurgency’
© Johnny Gin, Untitled, 2014, from the series ‘The Architecture of Insurgency’
Johnny Gin is a copywriter and photographer living and working in Hong Kong. His photographic interest lies in the examination of urban spaces and vernacular environments and the ways in which these spaces inform us about the culture and identity of a city. His personal and student work have been exhibited in Hong Kong and in Savannah, Georgia. He is currently an MFA Photography student in SCAD Hong Kong.