View cart “Niagara – Alec Soth (II edizione)” has been added to your cart.
The Queen, The Chairman and I – Kurt Tong
Bunnan's father moved his family to Hong Kong in 1911 after the fall of the Imperial empire. He continued to work as a deckhand on whatever ship he could get a job on and was away for months at a time. He was addicted to opium and would spend his time, whenever the ship docked, smoking the drug that killed his father.
Shook Ying, born in 1911 was the daughter of a Chinese trader based in the Philippines. She sent in this image as her matchmaking picture, hoping to find a good husband. She initially thought the unattractive man on the right was to be her husband and commented that, ‘well, as long as he is hard working and ambitious’
Hong Kong which means ‘fragrant port' in Chinese was the name given to a small settlement on the southern shores of the island, one of the first points of contact between the British and the local fishermen. Fragrant incense was stored around the harbour, giving the port its name. After the Treaty of Nanking, the entire island was then referred to as Hong kong and the British began developing Victoria Harbour on the northern shores on the island.
€ 48,00
Dewi Lewis, 2019 Hardback, 25 x 19 cm 244 pages, 112 images English and Chinese text
‘The world is always changing. We have to look inside ourselves to find what stays the same, such as loyalty, our shared history and love for each other. In them, the truth of the past lives on’. Ronald Bass
Kurt Tong was born in the city of Hong Kong, still formally a British colony, in 1977, with the awareness of the possibility of a transfer to England for study or work. The inhabitants of Hong Kong, at the time, had a cultural identity very distant from that of the Chinese. As a matter of fact, they all sang “God Save Our Queen” as a national anthem at school.
For two years, under the pretext of building a family diary for his daughters, the young Kurt Tong retraces the history of his family, divided between Hong Kong, England and China, in an attempt to discover how the influential personalities of these countries have changed the fate of a family tree that, as for all of us, seems immutable and subject to fate.
The Queen, The Chairman and I, with its nineteen chapters, goes beyond the boundaries of family photography, becoming a pillar of deep solidarity that runs through generations. Tong is a storyteller who, scene after scene, exposes all the stages of what we might call the struggle for survival and consolidation of family fortune, involving social positions and destinies.
It is more than an attempt to wrest a genealogy from inevitable oblivion, there is no symbolism here. The Queen, The Chairman and I is the most human and shared portrait of a family to which, among opium, commerce and marriage alliances, we become a little more attached to each page.
€ 55,00
