Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park II

In Andreas Gursky’s Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park, 1994, the artist presents a staggering birds-eye view over the manicured lawns and winding walkways of a tree-studded park, to the harbour beyond, where industrial ships make their way into the wide open sea. Stretching two metres in height, the work towers over the viewer, presenting a God-like aerial panorama in which each minute figure that lines the paths of the park is rendered with complete anonymity. An early example of Gursky’s practice, Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park has been included in multiple surveys of the artist’s work, including exhibitions at the Tate, Liverpool in 1995, and at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1998. Created just prior to the transfer of the sovereignty of Hong Kong from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, this image captures the atmosphere of a city caught in the throes of change. Juxtaposing the immaculate greenery, shimmering lake and near-clinical architecture of the plaza with the comparatively desolate atmosphere of the commercial harbour and ominous ocean that lies across the road, Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park simultaneously represents a real and artificial landscape, both technically and conceptually.

Far from being a single image, Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park represents a digital amalgamation of numerous perspectival stances, granting the viewer an omniscient vantage point. The work presents a grand spectacle of human activity: from the peaceful tranquility of the figures doing Tai Chi in the immediate foreground, to the bustling shipyard captured mid-construction in the distance. However, despite the structural and narrative complexity of the image, Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park remains rigorously ordered, divided into distinct compositional bands. Gursky’s exquisite detail is subsumed by the work’s architectural scaffolding, imbuing the work with an almost Minimalist sense of geometric purity. By creating distance between the viewer and his subject matter, Gursky induces a kind of unearthly transcendence – a vision of the world as we have never experienced it before. As Alix Ohlin has written, ‘The subject of Gursky’s work, is the contemporary locus of the sublime: a grand power in the face of which we feel our own smallness ... Gursky’s vast photographs of the Hong Kong stock exchange, massive ships docked at a harbour, cargo planes preparing to take off, a government building-testify to this power. Although his photographs give us images of globalization, Gursky is seeking less to document the phenomenon than to invoke the sublime in it’ (A. Ohlin, ‘Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime’, in Art Journal, vol. 61, no. 4, Winter 2002, p. 24).

Originally taught by Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Gursky has often been associated with a documentary style of photography. However, through his use of large-format imagery and brilliant colour, his work makes a fundamental departure from reality. Indeed, faced with what he considered to be the fundamental inadequacies of documentary practice, in 1992 Gursky was persuaded to begin using digital technology as a means of manipulation. In doing so, the artist skillfully generated an ‘illusion of a fictitious reality’, caught between accurate representation and a purposefully artificial reframing of the world (R. Pfab, ‘Perception and Communication: Thoughts on New Motifs by Andreas Gursky’, in Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the Present, exh. cat., Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Dusseldorf, 1998, p. 9). In Hong Kong, Grand Hyatt Park, Gursky masterfully distils the emergent patterns and gridded symmetries of his vista, highlighting the consensual flow of data, people and architecture. A portrait of a landscape in flux, the work perfectly embodies the artist’s quest to capture a globalized vision of the world.