Few months after my first visit I had an unplanned trip back to asia - this time visiting Hong Kong, Canton and some villages few hundred kilometers into mainland. This time I came to adapt and even partially like what I saw, or just maybe I started to understand this country a bit.
[Hong Kong 2018 ]
I sense peace. And I’m afraid ask. Find out what happened, why are you here, sitting in your "room", quiet, in the sleeping city of great progress. We are divided by the barrier of everything but this moment recorded something in me.
[around 1 am, Hong Kong, 2018 ]
Hong-Kong city center, rush hours, heat of the day. Day after day citizen’s eyes are learning to avoid what they don’t want to see. Avoid the heritage they don’t want to remember. Everything just flows around, shapeless, like water.
Doesn't it look so exotic and romantic? So “photo worthy”? Maybe, but it’s just a memory of the past. It’s almost a museum figure. Showing the forgotten history to the people of new era, entertaining the crowd. Yet for sure he once was a cormorant fisherman by trade, not an actor without the right to pose like that. But this will probably change soon. Will You care?
[ somewhere in Yangshuo, few hundred kilometers north from Canton ]
Before an important parade, a moment of work that evokes memories. Not from this city but from somewhere afar, somewhere from and old past.
[ this photo won 1st place in the “Planet” category in Ministry of Foreign Affairs "Lens on Development 2019" photo competition organized by the National Geographic Polska magazine; photo taken in Canton ]
Canton, 2 am in the night, yet for her it’s still day. Is it her first day in work? Or maybe it’s hers 3-rd year? Now when I think of it it probably doesn’t matter, not yet…