In the exact middle of 1997 sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from Britain to the People’s Republic of China. During that year I took one black and white photo on every day (as part of a larger photo-documentation project that involved taking at least one photo every day from 1995 to 2000, a five year period centred around the handover). Digital versions of those still photos are presented here in strict chronological order, at the rate of twelve images per second. The entire year’s sequence is repeated ten times over.
Some of the themes that have interested me, and which this work relates to, are:
Creating images in one medium, then presenting them in another.
Exploring the possibilities of looping and repetition.
Turning an archive into an artwork.
Compressing time (in this case: a year in about a minute).
Investigating the different possibilities of viewing offered by different speeds of display.
Content as a glimpse (De Kooning’s notion).
Experimental documentary work – challenging conventions of documentary film and its photographic equivalent.
Treating the task of preserving and mobilizing historical memory as being of great political importance, and one in which images have as much a role as texts, but also discovering the liberatory potential at certain points of grinding historical traces down almost to dust. ‘Deconstructing’ or revisiting my own earlier use of photography as part of a memory-based resistance against textbook historical grand narratives.
Revisiting the Hong Kong handover moment with historical hindsight.
Seeing the handover of sovereignty as a process taking place over time rather than as a discrete event occurring in one moment.
Investigating liminality.

David Clarke is both an art historian and a visual artist. Trained in London, he moved to Hong Kong in 1986 to take up employment at the University of Hong Kong, where he worked till 2017. Clarke’s art historical research has been primarily in the areas of American and Chinese art history, and his sole-author books include: The Influence of Oriental Thought on Postwar American Painting and Sculpture (1988); Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization (2001); Water and Art (2010); and Chinese Art and its Encounter with the World(2011). As a visual artist Clarke has exhibited his work in Hong Kong and around the world on more than sixty occasions during the last thirty years, including several one-person museum shows in Hong Kong and an extensive one-person exhibition in Britain. He has published two photo books concerning Hong Kong: Reclaimed Land: Hong Kong in Transition (2002) and Hong Kong x 24 x 365: A Year in the Life of a City (2007). Recent projects have focused on artistic collaboration: he undertook a dialogue with performance artist Kwok Mangho, with the composers Chan Hing-yan and Joyce Wai-Chung Tang (who have both separately written musical compositions in response to Clarke’s photographic images), and with creative writer Xu Xi (a word/image dialogue was published in 2016 as Interruptions by the University Museum and Art Gallery, HKU). Clarke is the founder and academic director of the Hong Kong Art Archive (http://finearts.hku.hk/hkaa/), and has played major public service roles for organizations such as the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, and the College Art Association. A series of 73 lectures by Clarke on modern art is freely available online athttp://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsYxtdAdqBSfNEVf2Y9WsN1YyOe-5G52i.