China Quick-Fix

Quick-Fix: Exhibition Introduction

Since beginning my love affair with quick-fixes in 2014, when I moved to China, I have travelled enough to be able to collect similar images from other countries upon the same theme. This exhibition is the first to take this broader international view of these treasures hidden in plain sight: it includes pictures from Laos, Thailand, India and Japan as well as pictures from the main archive that covers China.

This collection is not a scientific survey; if I were to spend time in Turkey, the Bahamas or my home country the UK, there would no doubt be pictures from these countries too. What it offers instead is a way to look behind the scenes at people and places. In our contemporary era of social media and photo editing, there is a tendency to show things at their best. Sometimes the pictures stray so far from reality that we start to doubt them but most of the time they have their intended effect; that’s why so many of us sink so much time into creating, sharing, viewing and commenting upon pictures online.  

Just as we have ways to show ourselves at our best, there are also ways we typically show a city. Tourists come here to Hong Kong and take endless pictures of themselves standing in front of Victoria Harbour with a view of the skyscrapers of Hong Kong Island behind them. They look through these pictures to find the one with their eyes open and a pleasant smile, perhaps they run it through a beauty filter, then it is good to share. Tick! They now have proof that they have visited Hong Kong.

The genuine experience of meeting someone face to face or visiting a new city is of course more diverse. You see beyond the smile put on for the camera and you see locations that are not designated photo sites. If you look more carefully still, you come to realize the city has a front stage and a back stage. In Hong Kong this is particularly obvious when you stray down the back alleys behind buildings where quick-fixes pop up in abundance, like mushrooms after the rain.

One reason the quick-fix is an interesting subject is that it immediately takes you far away from the idealised city and into the nitty gritty of daily life. With the shiny ideal out of the way, alternative narratives can come into view. We see the problems people encounter and how they deal with them. It is tempting to sometimes see these negotiations as a broader metaphor for how the city functions in general. This collection allows even encourages this and, for the first time, permits connections to be made between different countries. The narratives which emerge belong more clearly to the diverse range of people doing the fixing rather than to any one specific nation.