{"id":33053,"date":"2025-07-30T18:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T18:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/33053\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T18:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T18:19:09","slug":"greg-girard-illuminates-m-facade-with-visions-of-1970s-hong-kong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/33053\/","title":{"rendered":"greg girard illuminates M+ facade with visions of 1970s hong kong"},"content":{"rendered":"

greg girard\u2019s hk:pm loops along hong kong\u2019s waterfront<\/p>\n

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Hong Kong\u2019s skyline is lighting up nightly with a tribute to its own past. M+ Museum<\/a> unveils HK:PM, a new moving image commission by Greg Girard<\/a>, transforming its iconic LED facade along the bay into a visual journey through the city\u2019s transformation from the 1970s to the 1990s. Animated from Girard\u2019s extensive personal archive of analogue photographs<\/a>, the series weaves together street scenes from Central, neon-lit avenues, moments of daily life, and images from the now-demolished Kowloon Walled City<\/a> \u2014 capturing the at once intimate and electric character of Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s cinematic lens.<\/p>\n

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all images courtesy of Greg Girard | image by M+ Museum<\/p>\n

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a cinematic visual journey through the metropolis in the 70s-90s<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s collective identity. \u2018When 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,\u2019 the photographer writes.\u2018Creating HK:PM has been a journey of rediscovery\u2026 transforming fragments of Hong Kong\u2019s recent past into a cinematic sequence.\u2019<\/p>\n

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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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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image by M+ Museum<\/p>\n

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m+ museum reclaims urban memory through a sequence of images<\/p>\n

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Curated by Silke Schmickl, Head of Moving Image at M+, HK:PM builds on the museum\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Spanning over 65,000 square meters, M+ is among the most significant institutions for contemporary visual culture in Asia, and its LED facade \u2014 one of the largest media screens in the world \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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looping along Victoria Harbour\u2019s waterfront | image by M+ Museum<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"greg girard\u2019s hk:pm loops along hong kong\u2019s waterfront \u00a0 Hong Kong\u2019s skyline is lighting up nightly with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134,30587,30588,8212],"class_list":["post-33053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-greg-girard","tag-m-museum-hong-kong","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}