ANDREAS GURSKY

'The subject of Gursky's work, is the contemporary locus of the sublime: a grand power in the face of which we feel our own smallness... Gursky's vast photographs of the Hong Kong stock exchange, massive ships docked at a harbour, cargo planes preparing to take off, a government building-testify to this power. Although his photographs give us images of globalization, Gursky is seeking less to document the phenomenon than to invoke the sublime in it. He freely manipulates his images, altering the architecture of the built and natural environments, creating repetitions, deepening colors, and collapsing time, in order to heighten the sense of the sublime' (A. Ohlin, 'Andreas Gursky and the Contemporary Sublime', in Art Journal, vol. 61, no. 4, Winter 2002, p. 24).
With its majestic panorama, Hong Kong Port invites viewers to immerse themselves in the image, which rapidly dissolves from figurative landscape into a majestic work with radiant opulence. As Gursky has averred, 'my pictures are becoming increasingly formal and abstract a visual structure appears to dominate the real events shown in my pictures. I subjugate the real situation to my artistic concept of the picture' (A. Gursky quoted in L. Cooke, 'Andreas Gursky: Visionary (Per)Versions', M. L. Syring (ed.), Andreas Gursky: Photographs from 1984 to the present, exh. cat., Kunsthaus D?sseldorf, D?sseldorf 1998, p. 14).