Kai Wai Wong is a New York-based photographer. He grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United State in 2014. He received his BFA in Photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. His work has been featured in various magazines and platforms and exhibited worldwide. The next solo exhibition will be held in Nizhny Tagil Museum of Fine Arts in November.
Kai documents the missed moments in life and often creates numerous fragmented images stimulated by the power of the senses being interested in exploring how photos could reflect the photographer’s subconscious and mental state. He believes that the power of photography comes from the illusion of the realness, that is why he avoids making obvious images and being over explanatory as an approach.
About ‘Boredom’ – words by Kai Wai Wong:
This is a series of mundane and ambiguous daily life images that I have been photographing in my apartment since 2014 when I moved to San Francisco from Hongkong. Most of them were taken under intuition and insouciance so that I had never treated them as a series or a serious photography project. Until 2018, on the eve of leaving the apartment where I had lived for almost four years, I look through the photos again and found that they were internally connected.
I didn’t act thorough preparation in order to make these photos intentionally, I cared for was the status of objects instead of the objects themselves. The objects I choose could have been anything but a part of my everyday life. Photographing happened repeatedly on a familiar living environment with a similar ray of light. Most of the time, the process dropped me into a contradictory feeling rather than enjoyment. Repeated pictures were taken again and again although I already felt bored. I rarely think about their meanings and purposes, I am afraid of being too obvious or showing a specific intention. Unconsciously, however, I projected myself on the objects while the photos reflected my mental status and attitude towards life.
