Mercury 200
"Mercury 200" collects photographs taken by me on the outlying islands of Hong Kong. The name "Mercury 200" comes from the product code text I saw on the engine casing of an abandoned old boat while wandering around Peng Chau Island one day.
My first arrival in Hong Kong marked a year-long residency.
Despite geographically both Guangdong Province and Hubei Province being part of the southern region of China, as a descendant of builders who had no sentimental attachment to their homeland, I had long accepted the Guangdong people's notion that "everything north of Guangdong is the north." I remember when I was young, during the Spring Festival period, sometimes we had to take long-distance buses back to our hometown. What seems now like an incredibly noisy, crowded, and even unbearable overnight journey was, to me at that time, an exciting part of the "northern journey" experience. After all, anything in the eyes of a child is an adventure. The television hanging in the bus at night always played some pirated movie discs. I remember after watching two tense and exciting movies, "The Invisible Man," I also watched a movie where Anthony Wong's character was a police officer." Unfortunately, I no longer remember the title and plot, but regardless, that was my first encounter with Hong Kong.
Many years later, during my university years, I began to learn about the Hong Kong New Wave films of Wong Kar-wai, and the dampness and romance became my impression of this city. In 2021, I came to Hong Kong to study and live. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, my home in Shenzhen seemed distant, and the pandemic made it difficult for me to relax and take photos in the crowded city. My aversion to masks appearing in the frame far outweighed my concerns about contracting the virus. In such circumstances, taking photos while traveling to various outlying islands from Central Pier became my pastime at the time.
"Mercury," as the closest planet to the sun, was an apt metaphor for the high temperatures in Hong Kong at the time; and its meaning as the liquid metal, was also incredibly fitting for the sea seen through the glass on the boat. While feeling refreshed by the air conditioning set at the lowest temperature inside the boat, the beautiful sea outside the window was also scorching hot. And the "Mercury 200" engine casing where I found myself was surely a kind of revelation—a broken engine, a broken boat, must have traveled to many places during its service life, isn't this what I, carrying a camera, hoped for before the end of my life? As long as there is a camera with me, the journey always remains filled with the motivation to continue. It seems that the camera also serves as an engine, and as the film advance lever turns the film, it also drives my life, creating both sweat and photographs.
