Opening a Treasure Box of Memories: Kwun Tong, Telephone Booths, and Hong Kong Stories with Photographer Hang Tam
Book Signing Event with Hang Tam 譚昌恒簽書會
Date: Sunday, September 6, 2026 Time: 3:00–5:00 PM Venue: Blue Lotus Gallery 28 Pound Lane, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong
Sunday, September 6, 2026, from 3:00–5:00 PM at Blue Lotus Gallery for an afternoon with Hong Kong photographer Hang Tam, who will present two of his handmade photobooks.
Many photographers represented by Blue Lotus Gallery have taken Hong Kong as the central subject of their work. These include Fan Ho, whose street scenes captured the city in the 1960s; Keith Macgregor, who photographed Hong Kong throughout the 1970s and 1980s; and Birdy Chu, whose photographs document Kai Tak Airport and the aircraft departing from it. Their work continues to resonate with audiences because it evokes personal memories of a city that is constantly evolving, preserving moments that might otherwise be lost to time.
Continuing this exploration of memory and Hong Kong, we will invite Hang Tam to the gallery to present two photobooks: It really is Kwun Tong? and Hello! Do You Remember Me? Through photographs, archival materials, found objects, and unusual book structures, both works explore the ways Hong Kong’s past can be remembered and experienced through the photobook.
Photographer Hang Tam will guide readers through his photobook, It really is Kwun Tong?, which takes the unique form of a silver box. Opening the box begins a treasure-hunt-like experience, with maps, letters, receipts, and a large collection of photographs that together lead readers on a visual journey through Kwun Tong.
It really is Kwun Tong? begins with Hang’s personal story, taking readers back to the Kowloon neighbourhood in the 1970s — formerly written as “Kwun Tong / 官塘” — and tracing the transformation of the same place across four decades. The project is also a “father-and-son collaboration” across time and space, bringing two generations together through images. In doing so, the photographs become fragments of memory that connect past and present, allowing the history of a changing neighbourhood to be rediscovered through the eyes of those who remember it.
Hang Tam’s latest work, Hello! Do You Remember Me? was shortlisted for the Luma Rencontres Dummy Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. Inspired by Hong Kong’s collective memories of public telephone booths and old Yellow Pages directories, the book is conceived as an object of urban archaeology.
In the book, Hang interweaves images of public telephone booths, old telephone directories, and telecommunication objects from bygone eras with familiar lines from popular films, evoking the romance of an earlier age of communication. Once, people would step into public telephone booths to have private conversations, temporarily separated from the world around them. In an age when communication is more immediate and accessible than ever, what remains of that desire for connection? Hello! Do You Remember Me? becomes an old telephone booth on paper, a piece of paper architecture that can be opened and explored, bringing the memories of a disappearing world of communication back into view.
Together, It really is Kwun Tong? and Hello! Do You Remember Me? explore the idea that a photobook can be more than a collection of images, becoming an art object in its own right. Both works take archival photographs, old telephone directories, found objects, and elements of popular culture and transform them into something that can be explored and experienced as much as read. In doing so, they reflect on the layered memories of individuals, families, communities, and places, while exploring the relationship between photography and bookmaking.
At the event, Hang Tam will share the ideas and process behind the two books and sign copies for readers. A limited number of handmade editions will also be available for purchase on site.
Whether you are interested in Hong Kong’s collective memory, photography, or book design, this is a chance to encounter these two unusual photobooks with the photographer himself.
A second edition of Robert Fortune’s Three Years Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China: Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk and Cotton Industries With an Account of the Agriculture and Horticulture of the Chinese, John Murray, London 1847 – includes illustrations.
Brilliantly there is now an affordable paperback edition of British Modernism and Chinoiserie, (Edinburgh University Press), edited by Anne Witchard (Emeritus Fellow of the University of Westminster) ….
British Modernism and Chinoiserie Explores Chinese artistic and stylistic influences on Modernist practice in early-twentieth century Britain This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British Modernism.
Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealised notion of China, chinoiserie was revived among London’s avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia.
As part of Modernism’s challenge to the ‘universality’ of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking.
As these 10 new chapters demonstrate, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes.
At the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialised.
The essays show that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period.
Key Features * 10 original chapters from leading international figures in the field, including Elizabeth Chang, David Porter and Patricia Laurence * Includes 28 figures (10 in colour) to illustrate the text * Coverage of literature, painting and poetry, as well as performance and visual media, theatre, fashion and dance, interior and garden design and international exhibitions.
A little follow on from my post yesterday regarding my latest column for Macau Closer magazine on Maurice Dekobra’s 1938 Macao: L’enfer du jeu:
Maurice Dekobra’s 1938 Macao: L’enfer du jeu (Macao: Gambling Hell) has never been translated into English. But here’s a French first edition from Les éditions Baudinière of Paris, who were Dekobra’s long time publishers…
Unfortunately in 1940 founder Gilbert Baudinière chose to align with Vichy and Éditions Baudinière pivoted into publishing explicitly antisemitic and collaborationist literature immediately following the German occupation of France. In 1944 Éditions Baudinière was officially banned and excluded from the French publishing profession.
My latest column for Macau Closermagazine (online and available in Macau at stockists including Livraria Portuguesa) is on the now rather overlooked interwar French literary star Maurice Dekobra’s 1938 novel Macao: L’enfer du jeu (Macao: Gambling Hell), unfortunately never translated into English and, perhaps more intriguingly, you can watch the French movie adaptations (the original was reshot for reasons of Nazis, Vichy, antisemitism and occupation…
Oliver Bullough’s Everyone Loves Our Dollars (W&N) is a fascinating read on the business of money laundering. For those interested in where China fits into the global picture Bullough has plenty to say on Informal Value Transfer Systems (IVTSs), Bicester, Macao and Chinese involvement in Saipan.
We spoke about this and a lot more at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last week…
A Royal Berkshire Regiment’s embroidered panel. The regiment’s predecessor (the 49th Hertfordshire Regiment of Foot) fought in the First Opium War in China, being awarded by the British Army the “China Dragon” symbol for actions in Chusan (Zhoushan), Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), and Shanghai. Later units also served in garrison and patrol duties in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Thomas Cook’s Handbook for Tourists to Peking, Tientsin, Shan-Hai-Kwan, Mukden, Dairen, Port Arthur and Keijyo – that’s to say Beijing, Tianjin, Shanhaiguan, Shenyang, Dalian, Lushunkou and Seoul. This is a second edition with the original publisher’s yellow cloth boards, cover lettered in black within black frame, yellow advertising end papers, folding frontispiece map of railway and steam connections across East Asia and folding maps of Beijing and Seoul.
The second edition was published in 1913 in London and was revised and updated version of the first edition in 1911 and the end of the Qing and formation of the first Chinese Republic. They included the line, “It is seldom such momentous changes take place in a country within three years as have shaken the political, industrial and civil life of China since this book was first compiled.”
Date: Sunday, September 6, 2026
Time: 3:00–5:00 PM
Venue: Blue Lotus Gallery
