Opening alongside the release of the new publication Hong Kong symphony, the exhibition returns to Fan Ho’s photographs of Hong Kong and his distinctive way of seeing the city in the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibition coincides with a renewed international focus on Fan Ho’s work, with presentations taking place at major institutions and galleries across Europe and Asia.

Fan Ho’s photographs are among the most recognisable images of post-war Hong Kong. He photographed the city’s streets, markets and harbour fronts with a sharp sense of timing and composition, revealing poetry in everyday life and drama in fleeting moments. His pictures are carefully structured but never static, capturing the density, energy and changing character of a city in transformation. In Fan Ho’s own words: ‘Photography should offer something we cannot see with our eyes but feel with our hearts’, a conviction that lies at the very core of his practice.

The exhibition places Fan Ho’s photographs alongside selected vintage works by other Hong Kong photographers of the same generation, offering a broader perspective of the photographic landscape in which his work emerged. Together, these images reveal different approaches to photographing the city during a period of significant change, while illuminating the wider photographic culture that helped shape its visual identity.

In these works, Hong Kong appears as a place of striking contrasts. We see an older way of life in scenes of rice fields, oxen, hillside farms, and boat communities gathered in harbours thick with smoke from evening cooking fires.

At the same time, other photographs show a city in motion: buildings under construction, crowded markets, new roads, and the gradual shift from low-rise streetscapes to a more vertical urban form. Through the eyes of Hong Kong’s salon photographers, this period was not only documented but transformed into images of formal beauty, atmosphere, and quiet poignancy. Today, much of what they recorded has disappeared. For this reason, these photographs are more than artistic achievements: they also form an important visual archive of a Hong Kong that has largely passed from view.

The exhibition is presented alongside the brand new publication Hong Kong symphony, which brings together Fan Ho’s photographs of the city in book form.

The release coincides with several international exhibitions featuring his work, including a major solo exhibition at Palazzo Falletti di Barolo in Turin, his inclusion in Light and magic: the birth of art photography at Tate Modern in London, and presentations at Fotografiska in Shanghai this fall and Shenzhen next spring.

Together, these exhibitions reflect the growing international visibility of Fan Ho’s work and its place within the wider history of photography.