Michael Wolf is a photographer who pictures our life and demonstrates how absurd and weird it seems to be from outside. Due to his photos one might realize how usual things appear to be odd and really strange. We are stuck in a rut and sometimes hardly notice what surrounds us, what we face every day.
Michael Wolf was born in Munich, Germany but was raised in the United States. As a photographer he became well known for his pictures of China and Chinese reality. His books Sitting in China and China im Wandel are devoted to the Celestial Empire. One of the most interesting projects by Wolf is dedicated to Hong Kong. Architecture of Density depicts complex architectural constructions in Hong Kong. The area is supposed to be the most densely populated in the world. Lots of people are dreaming to move to HK especially from Mainland China. The facades of those buildings remind strange abstractions. “…in Hong Kong I had the good fortune of photographing my Architecture of Density series in a way which hadn't been done before that rigorously. I cropped every building that there was no sky and no horizon so the result was that you had a very tight picture which could be credibly large because you had no idea where the building ended on the sides and on the top”. At the same time pictures of Hong Kond by Wolf are very precise as Hong Kong is very overpopulated area. “… it suddenly became a statement on how we live in mega cities”.
The series 100 x 100 depicts 100 tiny flats in Hong Kong and their residents. Each flat is 100 square feet in size. Some of the flats are overloaded with useless stuff and junk. Anyway residents look happy living even in these shoe box rooms.
