Tony Mak (b. 1991) is a Cantonese Chinese visual artist. He works with mediums such as still images, films and explores on cultural landscapes, regional history and local communities. His photographic works often concern with conflicts between the past and the present, and humanities in contemporary times.
Often, he stands in a distant position to observe, and focuses on perceptual and introspective experiences with the objects rather than trying to engage with them. His images possess a sense of objectivity yet are innately poetic.
It is arbitrary to simply associate photographs with 'moment' or 'reality', or to simply replace memories with photographs. What we have often neglected is that, photography can be about imagination. Photographic imagination enables us to seek eternity in linear time, which provides us with an invitation to explore our memories, to travel past time, or to dream about a place that never exists.
MRes Filmmaking, Photography and Electronic Arts (Distinction) (2019)
MA Photography: Image and Electronic Arts (2014)
- Goldsmiths University of London
CONTACT
Publications:
After The Olympics, by Hoxton Mini Press, 2022
Awards:
2022
British Journal of Photography International Photography Awards 2021, Single Image Winner
2020
Photo Fringe OPEN20 SOLO, Shortlisted
Group Exhibitions:
2022
BJP International Photography Awards 2021 Exhibition, SeenFifteen Gallery (London, UK), November (forthcoming)
Cluster Photography & Print (London, UK): To The West Of The Solitary Sea, March
2021
Centrale Festival 2021 (Fano, Italy): Video Installation : Qing Ming (To The West Of The Solitary Sea), June
2020
Rotterdam Photo Festival 2020 - Transition (The Netherlands) : To The West Of The Solitary Sea, February
Photo Fringe OPEN20 SOLO (Worthing, UK): To The West Of The Solitary Sea, October
Photo Fringe 2020 (UK): The Legacies, October visit>
Feature:
2020
Another Place Magazine: The Legacies visit>
Reviews:
But Tony’s presentation is anti-didactic. There is no insistence on utopian harmony, nor undue focus on the irreconcilable visions of what Stratford should be. His subject is spatial reality—life and land as they coexist in individual moments. A neat row of docked hire bikes overlook an office landscape. On a building site, heaps of rubble wait to be transported to relay terrain, powder grey stretching from earth to cloudy sky.
- Ravi Ghosh, Photography Author, 2022 (on After The Olympics)
Retreat to Fish Island and Hackney Wick, and you find yourself back in the realm of the human, with buildings, boats and wildflower-sided paths that may be a bit scruffy in places but were clearly made with people in mind. As was all the sharp new waterside housing, even if it does look a bit lost in the industrial angle of the A12.
Tony Mak’s collection of photos in After the Olympics catches the fractured mood of this social cusp that remains a decade on from 2012.
- Sarah Birch, 2022 (on After The Olympics)
What is attractive, though, about your document and your thinking, what is noticeable, is that they act on a broad intellectual spectrum. At times, I would say, you are a common sense phenomenologist, especially when you take photographs, a medium that has a phenomenological bias.
- Ian Jeffery, Art Historian, 2019