‘The back alleys of the city are my canvas. Look behind any building and you’ll find something strange’
I’ve lived in Hong Kong for 22 years, but I still feel like an outsider. Its back alleys have become my natural habitat as a photographer. I can spend 12 hours a day wandering the narrow walkways behind busy restaurants, housing estates and shops. They can be daunting – filled with broken furniture, electronic castoffs, cockroaches and garbage bags full of food that rots and smells. I’m still surprised by the strange things I come across – and I love that. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
In April 2003, I was walking through a large housing estate on the Kowloon side when I stumbled across a small Chinese restaurant and a terrace that you could stand on. I looked up and saw four pink, plucked ducks strung up on metal hooks. It was a perfectly normal scene to a local, but it was really odd for someone who was still foreign. It was around the time of Sars, the bird-flu epidemic, so it felt controversial – as well as darkly comic – to be photographing dead ducks.
