Tokyo Compression By Michael Wolf

Wolf began his career as a photojournalist, spending over a decade working in Asia for the German magazine Stern. While shooting his final story for the magazine, “China: Factory of the World,” he discovered the seeds of his first major art project. Wolf developed the idea around plastic toys, a fascination of his since they were off limits to him as a child. In one month, he collected over twenty thousand toys “made in china,” scavenging through second-hand stores and flea markets up and down the California coast. He transformed this vast collection into an installation, The Real Toy Story, which integrates portraits of workers in China’s toy factories into a series of walls covered entirely in plastic toys of all kinds. The result is an overwhelming, immersive experience; a graphic representation of the gargantuan scale of China’s mass production and the West’s hunger for a never-ending supply of disposable products. The gazes of the factory workers humanize this anonymous ocean of toys and invite us to reflect on the reality of trade in a world of consumer-driven globalization. Many of the characteristics of Wolf’s work were already present in this first project: obsessive collecting, a recognition of the symbolic power of the vernacular, the combination of both macro and micro perspectives, and the ability to use a specific subject or focus to document the broader transformations of urban life.
In his best known series on Hong Kong’s highly compressed, often brutal architecture, Architecture of Density, Wolf uses the city’s sky-scraping tower blocks to great effect, eliminating the sky and horizon line to flatten each image and turn these façades into seemingly never-ending abstractions. Beyond the stark beauty of these compositions, Wolf’s studies of the thick concrete skin of the city make us wonder about the thousands of lives contained within each frame. Although Hong Kong is all but deserted in these images, minute signs of life creep to its surface… a shirt hanging out to dry or a silhouette behind a blind. Despite the stifling compression of this architecture, Wolf’s compositions are laced with evidence of people’s ability and need to express their individuality within these formal structures.
The formalism and deadpan approach of Architecture of Density echoes the work that emerged from the Düsseldorf school of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like the work of Andreas Gursky or Thomas Struth, Wolf’s photographs reveal a desire to document and connect with the world around him, but with a contemporary visual approach. Contrary to the lyrical drama of ‘classic’ documentary photography, these images are coolly detached from their subject and the photographer’s presence behind the camera is barely perceptible.
This work on the architecture of Hong Kong can also be linked to the new photographic approaches that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in the United States. The landmark 1975 exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a man-altered landscape, brought together a group of photographers who, in the sprawling post-industrial landscapes of the new American West, found a mirror for the transformation of the structure of American society. In the same way, Wolf found his inspiration in Hong Kong and China, places where ever-shifting cityscapes provided him with constant stimulation and the opportunity to document the many faces of this emerging superpower.