Michael Wolf: AO39, 2004

“When I first came to Hong Kong, I was slightly amused and on occasion turned off by the wild color schemes used to paint many of the buildings. I was vaguely reminded of cartoons: pink, red, yellow, green, orange as if to camouflage the true nature of what was going on inside.”—Michael Wolf

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas globally, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in apartments in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades. Here Wolf examines residential housing complexes which are tightly packed together to accommodate the population—nearly seven million people living on 426 square miles.

Photographed from opposing buildings with direct vantage points, he removes all reference to sky and horizon line, flattening the space until it becomes, in the words of curator Natasha Egan, “a relentless abstraction of urban expansion, with no escape for the viewer’s eye.”

Wolf juxtaposes the work in Architecture of Density with that of his series 100 x 100—to explore Hong Kong from the inside and the outside, the living spaces of the people in this dense metropolis, and the buildings that house them. The work was published in a two-volume slipcased set Michael Wolf: Hong Kong Inside Outside (2009).

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