Hong Kong Movie Magic, in Photos

Does your favorite movie say something about you?

That’s the question Jeremy Jangord explores in a one-night-only exhibition, starting today at 5 p.m. as part of Hong Kong ArtWalk. The show, “Hong Kong Cinema,” includes six photos of restaged scenes from films such as “A Beautiful Mind,” “Pride & Prejudice” and Wong Kar-wai’s “2046,” that the photographed subjects have chosen.

“I recreate people’s favorite movie scenes as a way of crossing the barrier of getting to know someone,” said Mr. Jangord.

Hong Kong ArtWalk is an annual charity event in which local galleries stay open till midnight for one night. “Hong Kong Cinema” will show on lightboxes suspended on a stone wall across the street from Above Second, a gallery in the city’s Sai Ying Pun district.

While each photo takes an hour or two to shoot, choosing a film — especially for cinephiles — can take weeks or months. “For people who really love movies, like me, it’s harder,” Mr. Jangord said. “If you love 100 different movies, how do you pick the one that’s incredibly important to you?”

Once decided, he and his photo subject watch the movie together in his Fotan studio, then pick the scene to reenact. As subjects explain what scene is most meaningful to them, and the two of them figure out how to stage and, when necessary, adapt it, the process draws photographer and subject closer together.


Jeremy Jangord
A scene inspired by ‘A Beautiful Mind.’
In one photo, a woman who chose to remain anonymous selected “Butterfly,” based on the Taiwanese novel about a married woman remembering a lesbian relationship she had in her teens.

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Mr. Jangord worked with the subject to recreate a scene where the two young girls sit at a lookout point over Macau, except in his version the subject is pictured alone, from the back, overlooking Hong Kong’s Lamma Island. “I love this picture best because she blurs into the background, the color of her shirt going into the landscape,” Mr. Jangord said. “It maintains her anonymity but captures that feeling of her losing herself in memory.”

Originally from Los Angeles, he moved to Hong Kong in 2010 and began work on “Hong Kong Cinema” later that year. After its ArtWalk show, he plans to continue work on the series, adding more photos and working toward a solo exhibition at a later date.

Previously based in Tokyo, his last photography project, called “New Tokyo Cinema,” took a documentary approach, he said, recording moments among his friends while projecting his own cinematic vision from behind the lens.

With “Hong Kong Cinema,” his aim was similar. “Even though the filmmaking process is fabricated, the goal is still to maintain a natural truth,” he said. “I wanted a way to bridge that gap [between photography and filmmaking] and take it to another level, while making the process incredibly more intimate.”

–ArtWalk starts tonight at 5 p.m. and runs to midnight. Tickets are HK$450.