‘This is my farewell letter to Hong Kong,” says Wong Chung-Wai, when I ask about the title of his astonishing photobook, Hong Kong After Hong Kong. “I wanted to use photography to preserve what’s left in the ocean of my brain, to create evidence of having lived in the city, as I don’t know if I could ever return.”
Wong recalls that, in 1980, his parents “waited for the guards at the border to rotate their positions” before swimming across Shenzhen Bay in mainland China to Hong Kong. Forty years later, Wong, like many Hongkongers, decided to leave the city after China introduced the national security law in June 2020, which has triggered continuous crackdowns and threatened civil liberties in the former British colony.
