Dustin Shum is a Hong Kong based documentary and fine art photographer. In his work, Shum focuses on the relationship between individuals and urban spaces, the living conditions of local disadvantaged groups, and the transformation of Chinese cities and towns in rapidly developing economy. His works have been exhibited in solo and group shows locally and internationally.
His works have been collected by the SFMoMA, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and private collectors. Shum has also published several photobooks including Themeless Parks (2008) and BLOCKS (2014). In Jan 2013 he co-founded The Salt Yard, an independent, artist-run exhibition space dedicated to photography, where he curated a number of exhibitions by overseas and local photographers.
Don’t Dare to Dream
In 2016, I walked into old neighborhoods undergoing redevelopment 一 or standing on the brink of it – with an inexpensive 360-degree camera in my hand. Onto these sites I casually and almost crudely superimposed anonymous mega-structures, stacking them over the existing cityscape as a kind of virtual projection of a future metropolis – a gesture akin to graffiti in image form, a visual release.
The starting point of this project came from my long-standing curiosity about a certain type of cultural product: foreign video games and Hollywood films set in Hong Kong. More often than not, the city is reduced to a cyberpunk backdrop. Its urban landscape is rendered in ways that are at once amusing and unsettling 一 fictionalized playgrounds filled with pseudo-Orientalist fantasies and exotic cliches. These portrayals have never truly confronted the city itself.
Rapid development has long been the norm in Hong Kong. Paradoxically, any image that claims to present an “authentic” representation of the city inevitably collapses into fiction, becoming just as unreal as those video game or cinematic projections.
I have no intention of producing photorealistic illusions. The layered and accumulated imagery in this series forms an ambiguous hybrid of reality and dream — difficult to define, suspended between the tangible and the imagined. Viewers may find themselves immersed in what feels like a chaotic labyrinth. Unlike the playful and visually sensational imagery of video games, these 360-degree photographs carry a sense of gloom and suppressed anxiety — something closer to a nightmare. They perhaps reflect my own psychological projection of Hong Kong, a panoramic manifestation of an inner landscape.
Today, former construction sites have transformed into luxury residences priced at tens of thousands per square foot. These developments have successfully gentrified once modest, grassroots neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the glossy renderings produced by developers — seductive and dreamlike — gently usher countless individuals aspiring to climb the social ladder into a dream from which it is difficult to awaken.
A decade passes like a dream. Yet perhaps it is still not time to wake up.