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The Hong Kong photographer Chun Wai’s photo collection – A Revelrous Heterotopia – focuses on capturing an instance of such revelry and intoxication. For more than 20 years since 1995, he recorded diligently the snippets of life that transpired in the Hong Kong Sevens, each captured moment examined for its inner meaning and metaphor. Rendered in a theatrical style and relaying a single context, over a hundred photographs are deliberately dissociated from time and space, presented as if happening during a single day. This de-contextualized and de-temporalized expression establishes the spatial-temporal uncertainty of those captured in the frame, with characters appearing as if emerging from a space different from our own.

A Revelrous Heterotopia presents the author's keen and unique perspective in portrait photography and his skillful shooting skills; the author uses black and white portraits in medium gray scale with medium particles throughout the book, allowing readers to enter the images with a calm and detached mind, and to delve into the hidden metaphors of the photographs. The book contains three essays that provide readers with multi-dimensional reflections, exploring issues such as the reverse thinking inspired by the origin of rugby, the association between the phenomenon of fan rave and the meaning behind the "Carnival Culture" proposed by the former Soviet literary theorist Bakhtin, the relationship between photography and theater, and the language and thinking of photography. A Reverlous Heterotopia is both a light-hearted, humorous collection of photographs, and a photo essay that presents a different kind of thought.

Introduction of the work by Chun Wai

Every spring, Hong Kong hosts an international rugby tournament: the Hong Kong Sevens. It is one of the only large-scale British sporting event that remains in post- handover Hong Kong. The Sevens has always fascinated me, and thus I was inspired to embark on this photography and research project. The tournament is a gathering of fervent rugby fans from all over the Commonwealth, coming together during these three days, each and every year.

On the south spectator stand of the Hong Kong Stadium, there is always a group of mischievous folks, dressed in outlandish outfits, sharing a tacit understanding. In an environment replete with alcohol and hedonism, half-drunk and half-awake they play around with conventional morality. From power, gender, and religion to Disney-esque fantasy worlds and trivial characters from real life, all is parodied and ridiculed. This referential, nonsensical black humor accompanies wave after wave of carnivalesque revelry, resembling a play of an absurdist theatre.

On these three days every year, in the higher reaches of Hong Kong’s South Stand, people immerse themselves completely in jubilation. The stage is open to all kinds of characters: Batman, a cardinal, Snow White, gangsters, ballerinas, dictators, robbers, an aunt from next door, court nobles, petty thieves, a policeman who forgot to wear his pants, or an outfit of crusaders. At this moment in time, Hong Kong – a city on the far-east of this planet – enters a more primal, dream-like state, becoming a heterotopia with no past or future, an incredible ethereal convergence of time and space.