NYAB Event - Sze Tsung Leong "Cities"

Sze Tsung Leong "Cities"

Yossi Milo Gallery

This event has ended.

Cities is an ongoing series of photographs, begun by Mr. Leong in 2002, that depict a wide range of urban formations throughout the globe, from medieval towns to recent constructions, and that together form a picture of the world, specifically through its cities, at this particular moment in time at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Cities continues the artist’s visual investigation of the world, as explored in his two previous series: Horizons (2001–ongoing), an international collection of images of natural terrains and urban landscapes that considers the relationships between far and near, foreign and familiar; and History Images (2002–2005), which examines the erasure of history and the reshaping of society through the built environment.

The photographs of Cities, both individually and collectively, combine expansive views and sharply defined detail that simultaneously render a range of scales, from the large to the small, and reflect how each city is an intersection of the monumental scales of civilization and society, and the more intimate scale of daily life. The scope and influence of this intersection make cities a fundamental and constant aspect of human existence, and the resulting complexity of these interactions has manifested in innumerable global variations. The range and nuance of these variations, expressed through the patterns of urban form, are depicted in each picture through an elevated vantage point that suggests the informational clarity of a map, but contains the dimensional rendering of a photograph. The consistency of point of view, formal composition, and descriptive detail of these photographs—which include views of cities as diverse as La Paz, Seoul, Nairobi, Antwerp, Houston, Havana, Amman, and Nagasaki—foreground both parallels and contrasts between social and historical structures as they have unfolded in urban form at different times and in different locations around the globe.