The Upper Station (photo gallery) will hold a photography exhibition of the internationally renowned German photographer Michael Wolf from 11 December 2010 to 16 January 2011. The exhibition will feature a series of photos of the corner houses in Hong Kong. Michael abstractly express the crowdedness of modern city architecture and the blurred distinction between private and public living spaces in his projects. In Hong Kong Corner Houses, he continues with his visual quest for the overlooked and underappreciated urban phenomena that give a city its special character. This time, he draws attention to Hong Kong’s urban corners and buildings that are often inconspicuous amid the high-rise, high-density urban clutter of Hong Kong. These ordinary residential-commercial buildings of ’50s and ’60s vintage represent the expression of local Chinese pragmatism and expediency in the economic austerity of early postwar decades. The photographic presentation captures the inherent paradoxes of their architectural character: the quiet prominence, attractive banality, and tectonic chaos that give urban Hong Kong its endearing quality.

About the Artist
Michael Wolf was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in the US where he graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1973. He also studied photography under the tutorship of Professor Otto Steinert in the University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany. He has worked as a photographer and author in China for ten years, and has been a resident of Hong Kong since 1994. Publications released to date are China in Transition (2001), Sitting in China (2002), Hong Kong: Front Door/Back Door (2005) and The Transparent City (2008). Recent works Architecture of Density and the Transparent City depict the repetition and density of cityscapes which abstractly express the crowdedness of modern city architecture and the blurred distinction between private and public living spaces. Wolf’s works have been shown on tour in the US, Italy, Belgium, Turkey and Hong Kong.