Dead Space (2015 – 2019)
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Dead Space is a photographic series depicting the hyperdense graveyards of Hong Kong, whose colossal tiered terraces reflect the verticality of Hong Kong’s built environment through a spatial typology of death like no other.
As a response to extreme urban density, combined with Chinese Feng shui tradition, the graveyards occupy the city’s steep mountainsides which overlook the coastal shorelines. Rippling outwards and upwards, the visual rhythm of the terraced gravestones presents a serene yet uneasy landscape, whose concrete tiers are grafted onto existing topographies.
Captured using telephoto lenses, the photographic series showcases the sublime monumentality of these necrogeographies, through images which compress their built form into monolithic geometries. Juxtaposed against backgrounds of towering skyscrapers, the photographs highlight the spatial contestation apparent in a city where the living and the departed are so intimately proximate.
Burial plots within these high-rise graveyards are extremely costly, with prices in many private cemeteries eclipsing those of the local residential market on a per square foot basis. Financially out of reach to many and given increasing space constraints, the Hong Kong government encourages cremation and the use of columbaria now, thus these graveyards stand as a spatio-temporal anomaly in terms of being historical remnants and an interface between eternal life and modern-day market forces.
This series, of 12 photographs was shot over five years between 2015-2019.
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