Six years after his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, photographer Wolfgang Tillmans returned to the city recently with his unfiltered, unedited and altogether untouched images.
“The Point Is Matter”, the 55-year-old German-born artist’s second show at David Zwirner Hong Kong, consists of more than 80 works, ranging from images taken in the mid-1990s to others captured recently in Hong Kong and in Shenzhen, southern China.
In addition a video installation, Four Videos of Build from Here, dominates one of the gallery rooms, accompanied by electronic music from Tillmans’ upcoming second album, Build From Here, to be released on April 26.
The visuals are mesmerising; one clip zooms in on the inner workings of an industrial offset printer from various angles, while another frames the moonrise above a dark sea as the artist’s silhouette moves against the shimmering reflection. In another scene, the moon glides across the screen.
Tillmans, who became the first photographer and non-British artist to be awarded the UK’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, says he is obsessed with astronomy and the vastness of space. The video captured the real-time movement of the moon seen through a telescope.
He first looked through a telescope when he was 12, he says.
“In my teens, I tried all sorts of mediums of expression, like painting, making music, drawing and even making clothes, only to buy a camera at 20.” He discovered the manifold possibilities of photography and it became “the source” of all his art, he says.
“[Some images] can be a painterly discourse, some can be documentary,” he says, referring to his famous records of the liberating hedonism of 1980s and 1990s nightclubs and youth subculture. Some may be pure studies in colour, nature, or abstraction.
“It is all based on the study of reality,” he adds. At the same time, he has always been interested in how lenses can show reality differently to how the naked eye sees it.
When he was a teenager, he was already using photocopiers to distort photos taken with borrowed cameras, or found images. In his 2023 series “Sirius Through a Defocused Telescope”, six inkjet prints depict the brightest star in the night sky with rainbows shining around it.
They were captured using a set-up that slightly refracted the light beam from the star, Tillmans explains. “There is no coloration here, no digital manipulation. It’s a recording of natural light.”
“I want there to be a certain sense of trust in my pictures as evidence,” he says, and jokes that he is probably the only photographer who doesn’t know how to use Photoshop.
While he did start using digital cameras in 2009, his way of image making has changed little, he says. “My photography is, in a way, always easy. From when I started 30 years ago, I’d always wanted to make the pictures look simple.”
But there is nothing random about his images. They reflect his understanding of the world and his recognition that information lies beyond the materiality and surfaces of things, he says. The point of “The Point is Matter” is to see beyond the seemingly casual display of pinned or taped prints on the walls.
“What runs through this exhibition is a deep interest in the matter of things.
“In today’s world, we are constantly living in the future as well as in the past. We’re projecting; we’re editing; we’re looking at pictures of things. But the actual things – this shirt, this branch, this leaf, this roadside, this ocean surface – these are the material realities of our life that I look at with great curiosity,” he says.
HKG Airport Interior (2023) is an apt example of this inquisitive lens. Fixating on the glitch on a screen at the Hong Kong International Airport, it brings attention to a technical mistake that most would otherwise overlook; but to Tillmans, it was a fleeting moment of authenticity to be preserved.
His ability to turn the mundane into compelling images is on show in Ulaanbaatar Still Life (2023) and Window Left Open (2023), still lifes of plants and windows in a study of light and shadow.
“I think a lot and I read constantly, newspapers and all sorts of publications. But I also really like to just rest my eyes on things and take in what life gives me at present. Life is infinitely interesting.”
“Wolfgang Tillmans: The Point is Matter”, David Zwirner, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Tues-Sat, 11am-7pm. Until May 11.