A love from beyond the grave – Kurt Tong on his ‘ghost marriage’ photographs

on the centre of Kurt Tong’s difficult visible narrative dear Franklin, there is a doomed love story it's additionally a ghost story. It traces the intertwined lives of Franklin Lung, a man who rose from negative beginnings to turn into part of Hong Kong’s social elite within the Forties, and a young woman typical handiest as Dongyu, the daughter of a excessive-ranking chinese language everyday.

They met, fell in love, but almost immediately after their engagement, Dongyu changed into considered one of several thousand refugees fleeing the chinese communist military on board the SS Kiangya when it struck an old jap sea mine. “Their love story should still have ended with this bad tragedy,” says Tong, “but it surely persisted after her death as a result of Franklin agreed to a ‘ghost marriage’, an complex typical ceremony through which he grew to be endlessly wedded to Dongyu in the spirit world.”

soon after, Franklin emigrated to the united states, settling in San Francisco, where he ran a number of unwell-starred companies earlier than returning penniless to Hong Kong. In 1962, still grief-afflicted, he jumped into Victoria harbour right through typhoon Wanda and turned into on no account viewed once more.

A love remembered … pressed flower and phrases from the Bible, as featured in expensive Franklin. photograph: © Kurt Tong

Tong came across the story in 2018, when a pal of a neighbour died, leaving at the back of an old picket trunk imprinted with a Taoist seal. internal was a stash of photographs, letters, notebooks and magazines belonging to Lung, whose lifestyles story Tong evokes from the scattered clues these personal consequences provided. There are a number of daring black and white snapshots, blurred and grainy: one indicates couples dancing around a fountain in a ballroom; a different is a blurred portrait of a gorgeous younger lady. A small publication of Bible prices about grief and loss includes pressed dried flowers. A typed letter from Lung’s sister, Noo Shan, admonishes him for associating with “a few companions of very undesirable class”. The mood is wistful and melancholic, made the entire extra so through Tong’s pers onal still lifes and interiors â€" vintage dresses, a half-lit room, a shank of human hair â€" all of which possess a haunting undertow of lives as soon as lived.

expensive Franklin has simply received Tong the Prix Elysée, which provides monetary help for an artist to turn a undertaking into a photobook. He describes this work-in-development as “a small human story that also suggests the larger photograph” â€" which, during this case, is the tumultuous backdrop of fading colonialism, war, invasion and displacement. A two-web page magazine unfold from the late Nineteen Thirties, just earlier than all the overseas sectors in Shanghai had been taken via the eastern, shows newborn soldiers practicing alongside images of volunteers doling out blankets and coats to crowds in Shanghai. As ever with Tong’s work, one senses the sweep of history in which his characters are inexorably caught up.

Sweep of background … two characters from the venture. graphic: © Kurt Tong

Born in Hong Kong of chinese language descent in 1977, and expert in Britain, Tong has long explored cultural identification and belonging via multilayered narratives that use discovered photographs, texts and files alongside his own photographs of interiors, objects and landscapes. Tong relocated to Hong Kong in 2012 along with his Scottish wife. “It wasn’t until my daughter was born 10 years in the past that I linked with my chinese language roots,” he says. “I all started exploring my household history â€" that’s in fact when my work clicked into region.”

pricey Franklin marks a wreck along with his fresh work, which has explored his own ancestral lineage and his complicated cultural and familial ties to China. I ask if contemporary anti-executive protests and the following clampdown by using the chinese authorities have affected his work. “With what is going on now, it’s very break up,” he says. “There are definitely sections of the metropolis where there is strong resentment to the government. For the protesters, anything else linked to China is dangerous. As an artist, I want to distinguish between the politics and the nation. however within the eyes of lots of my chums, it truly is impossible.”

China looms giant in Tong’s work to this point. For his collection candy Water, Bitter Earth, he travelled radically all over the country, capturing often hauntingly empty landscapes on a chinese language-made analogue digicam from the Nineteen Eighties. On his travels, Tong experienced a profound sense of belonging within the nation’s far off rural landscapes, however struggled to find any deep reference to China’s increasingly consumerist city lifestyle. “I realised that it is contemporary-day China and its people that I don’t remember,” he wrote on his website, “and my dream of redemption and return to a lost place of birth is eventually a failure.”

The landscapes were exhibited alongside negatives of ancient family images from his paternal aspect, which he distressed with the aid of submerging in sea water along the identical route his ancestors walked, and additionally through inserting them under his shoes. The decayed negatives, he says, reflected his tenuous and puzzled connections to his motherland.

‘I’m a photographer however my fascination is storytelling’ … Kurt Tong. graphic: © Kurt Tong

In his 2019 e-book The Queen, the Chairman and that i, Tong set out to reply the question: “How chinese language am I?” by means of trying to explore the approaches by which Queen Victoria and Chairman Mao â€" symbols of colonialism and revolution respectively â€" had shaped his family unit’s history and, with the aid of extension, his own lifestyles. His paternal grandfather had left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1911, lured by means of the balance and career prospects of a British-ruled colony. decades later, Tong’s mother’s household fled China as Mao’s military took over. The booklet draws on a few generations of family images and writings punctuated by way of his own photos of Hong Kong, which range from widely wide-spread scenic landscapes to diminished interiors that don't forget the colonial era.

For me, Tong’s most affecting series is Combing for Ice and Jade, which he describes as a “love letter” to his nanny, Mak, who labored for his family for 40 years. In her early 20s, Mak fled an arranged marriage in China, breaking her family ties and fitting one of the most remaining zishunu or “comb sisters” â€" girls who underwent an intricate traditional ritual courting lower back to the early nineteenth century by which their long, braided hair changed into combed out so as to signal their commitment to a lifetime of celibacy and independence.

“i wished her story to characterize all these decided chinese language girls who are now considered pioneering feminists,” he says. The resulting booklet is complicated: hand-stitched pages, pullouts, mounted Polaroid snapshots and inserts adding to the sense that, of all his advanced and ambitious undertakings, this is a real labour of love.

Tong began out as a photojournalist before becoming increasingly annoyed with the boundaries of the form. “I’m a photographer,” he says, “however my fascination is storytelling. I see photography as a place of excellent narrative freedom because there's so an awful lot area round a picture that you can fill through the use of your creativeness and telling your own reports.”

expensive Franklin features maps from the time of the 2d world war. image: © Kurt Tong

In dear Franklin, the crucial personality isn't a family member, but a stranger whose lifestyles Tong took place on accidentally. possibly due to this, Franklin remains an elusive presence, despite the fact that his story has an almost novelistic sweep and is framed by using seismic pursuits â€" the second world war, the sinking of the SS Kiangya, the chinese Exclusion Act. As ever, Tong has uncovered some captivating modern artefacts that shed easy on the greater photo, together with a ebook of guide that was published in the Twenties when Shanghai turned into occupied by using the U.S. and Britain. It might be used during the booklet.

“in the booklet,” he says, “there are letters for all cases, together with one on a way to present condolences after a shipwreck, which was reasonably a common prevalence at that time. one more offers a template for a request to borrow a grand piano for a party. They provide glimpses of how people of a definite class had been eager to adapt to life under colonial occupation.”

Tong’s imagining of a standard life in an mind-blowing time garnered praise from the Prix Elysée jury, who cited his capacity to create “a new narrative from narratives that exist already”. As such, pricey Franklin operates on the hinterland between the actual and the imagined, deftly addressing the ambiguous nature of images itself. “increasingly,” says Tong, “ambiguity is the essence of what I do.”