Emily Allchurch
'Towers of Babel: Hong Kong'
2024
H 160 x W 104 cm (Framed)
Archival framed C-Type Print
The composition of Emily Allchurch's 'Towers of Babel: Hong Kong' (2024) takes inspiration from the English artist and architect Joseph Gandy's 1836 painting ‘Comparative Characteristics of Thirteen Selected Styles of Architecture’. In her re-imagining of the territory of Hong Kong today, Allchurch presents three soaring towers cast in the golden hour light before dusk, placed in front of a characteristically Hong Kong mountainscape, with the towers of Shenzhen rising hazily in the distance.
On the lower tiers, the hustle and bustle of everyday Hong Kong life is depicted with traditional commercial shops, street hawkers and restaurants, jostling with trendy food outlets and retail gentrification. Whilst the outer towers show a mixture of residential architecture, including public housing and high-end speculative development, the central tower displays examples of traditional colonial and Cantonese style architecture from Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Stacked above, designer retail and luxury hotel accommodation are set around a 'dragon gate', atop of which monolithic and grandiose corporate architecture towers ever skywards.
Dotted all around the scene are the accoutrements of tourism, leisure and regeneration in this depiction of a forward-looking Hong Kong repositioning and celebrating its unique identity, both historically and geographically (its verticality, proximity and co-existence with nature), whilst also acknowledging the increasing connectivity with the Greater Bay Area. Responding to the curatorial focus of the Design Trust Charity Exhibition 2026, Allchurch's iconic 'Towers of Babel: Hong Kong' (2024) is her most recent local-focused work.
About Emily Allchurch
British artist Emily Allchurch uses photography and digital collage to reconstruct Old Master paintings and prints to create contemporary narratives. Her starting point is an intensive encounter with a city or place, to absorb an impression and gather a huge image library. From this resource, hundreds of photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together to create a seamless new “fictional” space. Based on the success of her 2011 'Tokyo Story' series, Allchurch started her collaboration with Karin Weber Gallery in Hong Kong in 2017 and has created numerous Hong Kong and China themed works ever since.
Her works are held in public and private collections worldwide, most notably the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Museum of London, UK, the Tokaido Hiroshige Museum, Japan, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, France, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, USA, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.