At the Photobook Cafe in Shoreditch, Jiaxin Chen’s City in Dual Exposure: Between Memory and Present, re-imagines the use of the language of Urban Photography. Through a series of illuminated panels, layered prints and other techniques the city of Hong Kong is presented as a subject of temporal collapse, rather than as a static entity. The city’s image is broken apart, put back together again, and finally, undermined.
Jiaxin Chen’s method of working destroys the idea of the photograph as a static representation. She views the photographic medium as an active surface — one in which the processes of perception, material and time come together. Using photographic experimentation (double exposure, cyanotype staining, montage, and physically manipulating) Jiaxin Chen questions the way a city can be simultaneously remembered and continuously rewritten. As such, her photographs exist somewhere between the realms of documentation and abstraction, just like the instability of memory itself.
Recurring throughout her photographs are familiar fragments of Hong Kong, (the red taxi, neon signs, and mirrored tower skyscrapers), however Jiaxin Chen resists framing these fragments as icons. Rather they appear as disjointed moments, layered and re-layered, until their ability to create a coherent narrative is lost. Buildings fold over onto one another, streets move from one location to another within the confines of a single frame, and light fractures across the surface of her photographs. Jiaxin Chen’s compositions vacillate between order and chaos, and represent the fragile balance between history and speed of development in Hong Kong.
The center cube installation is the exhibitions’ most dominant feature. Each face of the cube has a densely composed photographic collage displayed in the interior of the cube. Depending upon your position in relation to the cube, you will see conflicting perspectives of the same taxi, for example, daylight on one face of the cube and nighttime on the opposite face. Light leaking through the seams of the cube eliminate all spatial reasoning and encourage the viewer to walk around it. Functionally the cube serves both as sculpture and lens, destroying the difference between photograph and space.
Jiaxin Chen’s manipulation of surface — through bending, rubbing, and layering — reinforce her dismissal of photographic purity. The cyanotype tones used in the majority of her photographs are not merely decorative; they have conceptual properties. The tones evoke both the chemical residue of early photographic chemistry and a sense of distant longing. Jiaxin Chen’s material manipulations place her in the company of photographers who are currently concerned with the physical properties of photography, yet her concern continues to be with perception rather than nostalgia.
In her statement, Chen refers to Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and Benjamin’s theory of urban simultaneity — references that underpin, rather than overwhelm, the work. Each composition exists as a heterotopic space — the meeting point of two disparate realities that exist without reconciliation. The city exists as a theater of simultaneity — progress and decline, spectacle and silence, surface and shadow. In this fluid context, the viewer encounters not a single Hong Kong, but multiple versions of Hong Kong, layered and unstable.
Photobook Cafe’s muted lighting heightens the effect of this environment. Each photograph emits soft light off the surrounding white walls, projecting fragmented elements of the city into the space. Reflections cascade into the space creating the viewer’s outline with the image. The soft, mutual encroachment of the viewer’s silhouette with the image, reinforces Jiaxin Chen’s concern with perception — the act of looking is a fundamental component of the work’s architecture.
DONKI is perhaps one of the most striking photographs in the show. A diptych separated by tone and temperature, DONKI presents a woman waiting in relative stillness in cool-toned cyan light on one side of the diptych, and a street performer performing amidst saturated signage on the opposing side. The juxtaposition creates an unresolvable dialogue between stasis and motion, solitude and spectacle. Here, Chen captures the rhythm of a city always moving between action and contemplation.
What sets City in Dual Exposure apart from most urban photography is its refusal to sentimentalize. Jiaxin Chen does not engage in either nostalgic reverence nor documentary neutrality. Rather, she addresses Hong Kong as a condition — a continually rewriting and revising system of images and histories. Hong Kong is neither represented as lost or found, but as forever becoming. Chen’s photographs convey the power of dissonance rather than closure, suggesting that urban memory is an active, fluid process.
In an era characterized by rapid digital reproduction and compressed urban imagery, Jiaxin Chen restores photographic depth of time and material. Her Hong Kong is not a postcard or an archive; it is a space of interference, where memories flicker in and out of focus. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down, to view the city not as spectacle, but as an accumulation — of light, of surface, of time.
Jiaxin Chen has demonstrated herself to be a serious and innovative photographer in the current landscape of contemporary photography. Her work locates itself within critical theory without succumbing to it, and maintains an awareness of form, texture, and perception. These are not photographs to glance at, but environments to be experienced — cities that continue to unfold long after the light fades.
