(Pure Gold and Lace-Ups – An Impossible Dream 1953, at Sheung Wan)
Chan Chik was a famous photographers in Hong Kong. His works are among those of the Hong Kong artists documented by the Hong Kong University in its online visual archive, which writes briefly about Chan:
In the early years of his career, Chan studied painting in Yongqing Studio under Xu Yongqing. Later, he learned the skills of wood carving and graphic design from sculptor Yu Suoya as well as writers Nie Qiannu and Liu Huozi. During the anti-Japanese resistance war, he worked as a war correspondent for Ta Kung Pao Daily and reported wartime struggles from the east and north of Guangdong. When Hong Kong came under siege, he moved further inland to Guilin where he worked as a teacher in several schools including the Nanning Zhongshan Middle School, Nanning Middle School and Nanning Nursing School. When Nanning also came under siege he moved again, this time to the south of Guangxi. There he taught in the Tianbao National Middle School and Tianbao Teachers Training Institute. After the war, Chan returned to Hong Kong and joined The Great Wall Pictorial as a journalistic photographer. Later he was appointed the director of Photography in Xunhuan Daily . Before he retired in 1980, he had worked for Ta Kung Pao Daily and the The New Evening Post as a reporter and an editor. In his retirement, Chan has continued working and has often undertaken photographic and graphic design projects.
The image featured above is filled with a paradoxical mood, and therefore attracts the viewers' gaze. An introduction of the image writes, "That fashion perennial, the brogue, has recently been branded a "'colonial relic" in India and become the target of calls for abolition as regulation footwear for the country's schoolchildren. In Chan Chik's photography from 1953, the brogue is seen bearing down upon a man seated on the ground eating a meal. The orange cartons that surround him bear the trademark "Pure Gold". Whether the brogue held similar colonial connotations for Chan is not known, but through a combination of words and images, the photograph makes its point, communicating, among other things, the gap between reality and aspiration."
The "communicating… the gap between reality and aspiration" is achieved by two pairs of paradoxical, or contradictory, elements: the gigantic painted brogue stamping the underprivileged man, and the worthless carton box bearing the illusionary all-important "Pure Gold".
The introduction continues, "Chan was a tireless observer of the people around him who were rebuilding their lives in post-war Hong Kong. he beleived that "goof pictures speak for themselves. They should be straightforward, easy for everyone to understand."
For more of Chan's photographic works, check them out here.
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