Images of Lamborghini taxis, a beach along the Kowloon side of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor and red double-decker buses with airplane wings, a signature of Britain’s onetime ruling presence.
These visions may be beyond the imagination of ordinary Hong Kongers, but for Tommy Fung, a photo editor made famous by the internet, the surreal images reflect his creativity.
Fung manipulates photographs he has taken and almost all of his works carry his signature “SurrealHK” somewhere, such as on a taxi license plate or store sign.
He plays with perspective and proportions. He teases with a globe-spanning range of pop culture references such Teletubbies, Star Wars and the giant robot doll of “Squid Games.”
He commemorates events such as the border reopening between Hong Kong and China with an image showing a shadowed East Rail train car with windows almost blocked by human palms. With a sign visible for Lo Wu Station, the main rail checkpoint for passengers between Hong Kong and China, many viewers saw a reference to “Train to Busan,” a South Korean zombie-horror-thriller movie.
“He helps the world to discover the beauty and diversity of Hong Kong while encouraging locals to reinvent things that they’ve already become desensitized to,” wrote the Bored Panda website in a critique of Fung’s digital art.
Fung contends the more surreal an image, the more it pushes viewers to embrace a broader perspective that allows them to consider alternatives to everyday life.
Two-culture immersion
Fung, who goes by the nickname SurrealHK on social media, was born in Hong Kong in 1979. When he was 9 years old, he emigrated to Venezuela with his family. He studied graphic design there at the University of Zulia and obtained his degree in 2005. Soon after graduating, he started his own business as a freelance graphic designer and in 2014 was a finalist for the WYNG Masters Award, a Hong Kong contest with the theme of “Air” that year.
Two years later, Fung moved to Hong Kong.
“Basically, all your savings would be evaporated very quickly,” Fung said about living in Venezuela. “It's not a way of life. Even survival was a problem.”
Protests, riots and demonstrations marked the weekends before he left Venezuela for Hong Kong, which seemed safer and more stable.
And it was in Hong Kong that Fung started to use photo-editing software, editing images to raise consciousness on local issues, and founded his SurrealHK brand and website.
Fung said his edits of Hong Kong scenes reflect his immersion in Venezuelan life and culture since childhood. Venezuelans could laugh heartily even in deplorable living conditions and make jokes before taking matters seriously, he said.
And Fung said he used his outsider perspective to see aspects of Hong Kong that local people overlooked.
In one of his works, Fung placed 35 cameras on the wall of a Hong Kong subway station. These cameras, simultaneously and from the same angle, on January 7, 2021, captured images of a passing pedestrian dressed in black.
“Everyone sees my work differently,” Fung said. “My point of departure is simple. But if those audiences think of other things, I can't control them. I have no way of predicting what they will think of. … As to the message behind it, if the public wants to add their own interpretations in it, I have no way to control it.”
