Back To The Starting Point 回到原點 Ng Sai Kit 吳世傑

Back to the Starting Point showcases Ng Sai kit's latest photo works and presents his artistic endeavours throughout thirty more years. The arrangement of photos in the book sometimes jumps back to the selection of his previous “landscape” series like a retrospective, showing the refinement of his techniques and the lineage of his artistic development.

Ng Sai Kit's photo works may not be easy to the reader at the first glance, because his photos usually lack of specific titles, but title simply by dates, for avoiding signs and indications and leaving maximum room for reader's interpretation. It also means looking without clear direction, which the reader should give up preconception or expectation of typical photographic elements like event, place, history, cultural background and even ideas, and be prepared to give way to pure “looking” and contemplation. Through the door of realistic appearance, one may discover the depth of vision he detailedly constructed with visual space and substances, and then transcend to a metaphysical world beyond representation. Back to the Starting Point literally means a re-discovery through retrospection, it also means the anchor point of vision when looking into the cavalier perspective of the picture. By the mean of direct photography, his photos are captured and composed in meticulous details with the method of sectioning visual space, adjusting perspective and focus, while the choice of black and white photo enables him to flatten realistic dimensional association into light and matters, thus achieving visual consistency that creates the illusion of space.

Therefore, the images combine the dichotomy between true / false, void / solid, multi-planes / compression, dispersion / whole, division / connection, complication / pureness etc., as if breathe-in and breathe-out, contraction and relaxation. Looking through his lens and the specific point of vision in three dimensional space, the reader will see the chiliocosm in the way of “the one contains the many, and the many contains the one.”

Back to the Starting Point is also the journey of visual perception begins from the photographer's eye, that eventually returns to the reader's self. 

- Lin On-yeung, Editor

Back to the Starting Point╱回到原點〡Ng Sai-kit

╱吳世傑〡235 mm x 305 mm〡118 pages〡Hardcover〡Language: English and Chinese〡Self-Published〡Dec 2020