Blindspot Gallery is pleased to present Flower Show  by award winning Hong Kong photojournalist turned artist, Paul Yeung. The series captures the outfits and activities of visitors at the Hong Kong Flower Show, bringing out the humour of collective behaviour while making ridicule of the cliché of salon photography.

The majority of visitors at the Flower Show participate in photographing or being photographed with flowers as backdrops. It is their intention to capture a “beautiful moment”, in thus creating their own highly posed salon photograph. Yeung initially started this series in an approach for documentation, however in the process of making, the series evolved to become a style closer to tableau/ staged photography. Each image is an implied narrative, where the subject’s identity is hidden with her head and partial body cropped out of the frame. The narratives unfold through different layers, as backdrops of the flower show intersect with colourful, splendored appearances of the subjects whose emotions remain enigmas to the audience.

Prominently emphasizing the sarcastic humour on salon photography as imitation of painting that takes photography to a backward direction, Yeung presents the pictures in traditional Chinese scroll mounting with his hand written calligraphy of classical Chinese poetry about the wilting of flower. From the poetry, Burying the Flower from classical Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber(1) Yeung finds a conversation and contrast between the poem and his images, which echoes one’s sense of melancholy without introspection.

About the Artist

Born in 1978 in Hong Kong, Paul Yeung graduated from MA in Image and Communication (Photography) at Goldsmiths College, London in 2011. Yeung worked at different publications and agency such as Reuters as photojournalist for 10 years after graduated from BA of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000. He had received numerous awards presented by The Newspaper Society of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Press Photographers Association and was selected as one of the Fourteen “Hong Kong New Generation Photographers” at the Hong Kong Photography Festival 2010. In 2011, he participated in “Count to 12”, a part of “The Road to 2012” project commissioned by and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. His works were also exhibited in various group exhibitions in Hong Kong since 2008.