12 Lenticular Prints, 40 x 60 cm

深圳洞影 Shenzhen Shadows reinterprets Plato’s Allegory of the Cave within a shifting apparatus of visibility that mediates Hong Kong and Shenzhen. In the allegory, shadows projected onto the cave walls by puppeteers represent copies of reality, as light becomes the condition of knowledge and power. In recent years, Hong Kong and Shenzhen have become increasingly interwoven, 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 was first photographed on negative film, then developed and re-projected onto walls in Causeway Bay that approximate their original sites. Through this repetitive act of capture and projection, the images of Shenzhen are temporarily deterritorialized from their original political context and reterritorialized within Hong Kong’s cityscape, creating a by-product of twelve photographs. 

The photographs function as both document and foresight, as Hong Kong becomes the shadow cast by Shenzhen’s light. They reflect how ideology and definition are formed through the circulation of images. Shenzhen Shadows repositions the image within the interval between the real and its projection.