holditorloseit

Life is full of sunrises—a line colorfully printed on the back of a white T‑shirt worn by a child chasing soap bubbles in a waterfront park on a Sunday afternoon. This is one of the scenes I recall from people watching, a social situation in which I feel comfortable and at ease. I cannot help but invent stories about people while observing their appearances, gestures, and occasional interactions on the street. Yet any attempt to share those observations through photographs would inevitably, in Francis Bacon’s words, “deepen the mystery” of the stories that came to mind.

Before I recognized myself as an introvert, people watching had gradually become a habit. This series began with the intention of preserving a visual memory of that experience, during which I was also acutely aware of my own state of mind. The more I engage in people watching, the more I find myself unsettled by questions about the purpose of life—as though slipping into a temporary state of existential crisis. The photographs in this series depict individuals from different walks of life on the streets of my hometown, Hong Kong. In them, I discovered some visual clues to unfamiliar aspects of everyday street scenes in a fast‑paced, socially diverse Asian city.