Born in Hong Kong and studied photography at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada. Ko founded the FOTOCINE School of Photography and the Photo Centre in 80s and he was named ‘Photographer of the Year’ by the Hong Kong Artists’ Guild in 1992.
Ko is a founding member and Honorable member of the Hong Kong Institute of Professional Photographers (HKIPP).
He is also a founding member, former chairman ( 2013 – 2017 ) and current Honorary Chairman of Hong Kong International Photo Festival (HKIPF).
My work takes Hong Kong’s buildings and landmarks as its core, foregrounding the city’s relentless cycle of demolition and reconstruction. In an age where “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels observed, these constant transformations embody late capitalism’s logic: concrete structures are repeatedly dismantled and reassembled, dissolving into fluid signs and spectral images.
Drawing upon Lash and Urry’s concepts of spatialization and symbolization, I examine how urban space becomes deterritorializeddetached from fixed meaning-while architecture shifts from physical substance to circulating symbols and brand imagery. Through this perpetual cycle, authenticity erodes, identities become fluid, and collective memory fragments into ephemeral traces.
By reimagining these transient cityscapes, my practice reveals
Hong Kong as a quintessential “dream-like bubble”: what appears solid ultimately exists only as floating images, mirroring the fragility and illusoriness of contemporary existence under accelerating development and image saturation.