greg girard’s hk:pm loops along hong kong’s waterfront
Hong Kong’s skyline is lighting up nightly with a tribute to its own past. M+ Museum unveils HK:PM, a new moving image commission by Greg Girard, transforming its iconic LED facade along the bay into a visual journey through the city’s transformation from the 1970s to the 1990s. Animated from Girard’s extensive personal archive of analogue photographs, the series weaves together street scenes from Central, neon-lit avenues, moments of daily life, and images from the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City — capturing the at once intimate and electric character of Hong Kong.
Presented as a continuous loop, the sequence is presented like a silent film, shifting from imagery of students and street workers, nightclubs and celebrities, to soaring planes near Kai Tak, and the hum of activity along Victoria Harbour. Together they give renewed motion and meaning to fragments of memory of the metropolis through the Canadian photographer’s cinematic lens.
all images courtesy of Greg Girard | image by M+ Museum
a cinematic visual journey through the metropolis in the 70s-90s
Greg Girard has long been recognized for his capacity to document cities in flux. In HK:PM, his images return to their place of origin, animated at a monumental scale on the south-facing LED facade of M+ Museum. Through the interplay of movement and stillness, these photographs evolve into a visual narrative about a city’s collective identity. ‘When I first took the bulk of these images as a young photographer in the 1970s, I never imagined them resonating with an audience, let alone shown to an entire city,’ the photographer writes.‘Creating HK:PM has been a journey of rediscovery… transforming fragments of Hong Kong’s recent past into a cinematic sequence.’
This act of returning, of images taken in Hong Kong now projected back onto its skyline, gives the work an added resonance, and the incidental becomes iconic. The work is especially poignant as Girard’s practice often sits at the intersection of personal memory and urban transformation, looking at the transformation of various metropolitan cities across Asia. From the Kowloon Walled City to Phantom Shanghai, his archives document architectural disappearance with emotional clarity.
image by M+ Museum
m+ museum reclaims urban memory through a sequence of images
Curated by Silke Schmickl, Head of Moving Image at M+, HK:PM builds on the museum’s 2024 programme Hong Kong Made Me, an earlier collaboration with Greg Girard that transformed his photographs into a live cinema event scored by rock duo Gong Gong Gong. In this new chapter, the images are given a luminous stage to speak for themselves.
Spanning over 65,000 square meters, M+ is among the most significant institutions for contemporary visual culture in Asia, and its LED facade — one of the largest media screens in the world — has become a key platform for engaging the public through digital commissions. Overlooking Victoria Harbour, it functions as a civic media space and artistic landmark, transforming moving image into urban spectacle.
looping along Victoria Harbour’s waterfront | image by M+ Museum
image by M+ Museum
Greg Girard presents HK:PM
animated from Girard’s analogue photographic archives, the series captures the electric character of Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s skyline is lighting up nightly with a tribute to its own past
the sequence is presented like a silent film, shifting from imagery of students and street workers to nightclubs and celebrities
featuring images of the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City
a vibrant metropolis in flux
project info:
name: HK:PM
photographer: Greg Girard
location: M+ Museum, Hong Kong | @mplusmuseum
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