Being Hong Kong | "Winter 2023" Humanity

Using "RE" as its catchphrase, Being Hong Kong is a bookazine that re-examines Hong Kong's past, present, and future from multiple perspectives, including humanities and history, community and life, urban landscape and natural ecology, and design and art. This quarterly publication, issued four times a year, boasts a strong editorial and organizational ability that carefully delves into each theme while being interdisciplinary. With its visual design that conveys the charm of a book as a physical object, it has readers not only in Hong Kong but also around the world.

The impressive Winter 2023 issue, titled "Hong Kong People," looks back at 180 years of portrait photography taken in Hong Kong since it became a British colony in 1842, when photographic technology was introduced. It explores the photographic technology and cultural changes in Hong Kong, and the bygone eras and people through these portraits. This issue contains countless images that capture the memoirs of past times and people, including 19th-century Hong Kong discovered in photographs, the history of Hong Kong's photo studios where photography has long been rooted, the pre-digital photographic culture traced from artifacts left behind, portraits of women in the glamorous showbiz world after the war taken by photographers like Yau Leung, and eternal icons like Leslie Cheung and Shirley Chan from later eras, the relationship between portraits and art since the 1990s, the legacy of MBS Studio which worked on countless Hong Kong films, and the original form and identity of Hong Kong extracted from photographs over 100 years old.