The twilight saga
Hong Kong is a city of avid sunset hunters. How else does one explain around 200 people religiously turning up every year, during a particular week in October, at a precise spot near the flyover at Mong Kok station, training their cameras at the sky?
All that effort is spent toward capturing the sun going down between two high-rises. For there are only a few days in a year when the sun’s downward slide aligns with the location and architecture of the buildings to create such a spectacle.
Hong Kong with its combination of hills, seaside, chrome-and-glass high-rise clusters and never-ending sprawls of parklands and wetlands was never lacking
in instagrammable sunset locations. Then neither is it short on lensmen who shoot sunsets with a passion. As magazines keep publishing lists of the city’s best sunset viewing spots, the quest for newer and the more off-beat variety of these continues to grow.
If there is a logic informing Hong Kong photographers’ obsession with sunsets — and relative indifference to sunrise — it might have something to do with its residents’ high life expectancy and long hours spent at work. The idea of the sun filling the earth, sky and waters with its glow, before it makes a glorious exit, resonates well with a demographic that’s mature, and not just in years.
However, images of the twilight hour seem to acquire an extra layer of meaning in the time of a pandemic. As the year draws to a close and the world prays for the sun to set firmly on the novel coronavirus, this collection of Hong Kong sunsets is our way of trying to wish it away.