Jason Au took this picture in a shopping mall atrium one Sunday afternoon in Hong Kong in December 2020. At the beginning of that month, with Covid cases rising again, restrictions had been reintroduced that encouraged all residents to stay at home and limited groups to two people. Each group had to be 1.5 metres from one another. The shadows on the floor of the shopping centre created a natural grid for this social distancing. Au’s photograph was part of a series that saw him shortlisted last week, from among 156,000 entrants, for this year’s Sony World Photography awards in the architecture and design category.
Au has been taking pictures seriously since 2017. He is drawn to environments, he says, “that can create a geometric context”; the sunlit shopping centre matrix was perfect for his purposes, and the Covid regulations added to the formal symmetries. Through his lens, he suggests, he waits to “see people look trapped and lost inside an artificial geometric labyrinth without realising it – perhaps this is a metaphorical view of urbanity and the hectic contemporary way of life in modern cities like Hong Kong”.
That vision, always in black and white, seems a personal response to the clamour and colour of his city; Au’s camera looks for moments of stillness and clarity, finding ways to control the chaos. “Photography is a realistic art form,” he says. “However, black and white has the quality to strip away realism. You’re looking straight into the forms, gestures and soul of your photographic subjects.” In recent years, street scenes from Hong Kong have been synonymous with occupation and youthful protest; in this sense, though Au insists on an aesthetic rather than a political intent, his locked-down images, from the long year of indoors, appear doubly poignant.
The Sony World Photography awards exhibition is at Somerset House, London WC2, 13 April to 2 May 2022
