12 Lenticular prints, 40 x 60 cm

深圳洞影 Shenzhen Shadows recontextualises Plato’s Allegory of the Cave within a shifting apparatus of visibility that mediates Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. In the allegory, shadows projected onto the cave walls by puppeteers are degraded representations of reality, as light becomes the condition of knowledge and epistemic power. 

In recent years, Hong Kong and Shenzhen have become increasingly interwoven and deterritorialized through the flow of capital. The work envisions Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, as a future surface for Shenzhen’s projected shadows.

Across Shenzhen, banners and signs of the twelve “Core Socialist Values” construct an ideological landscape through language and repetition. Each slogan was first photographed on negative film, then developed and re-projected onto walls in Hong Kong that approximate their original sites. Through this repetitive act of capture and projection, images of Shenzhen are temporarily deterritorialized from their original political context and reterritorialized within Hong Kong’s cityscape, producing a by-product of twelve photographs. 

The work functions as both document and speculation, as Hong Kong becomes the shadow cast by Shenzhen’s light. It examines how ideology and definition are formed through the circulation of images, repositioning the image within the interval between reality and its projection.