Dick Lau’s Home consists of three series that re-examine the concepts of home and family through portrait photography.

In the series “Diminish”, for example, Lau photographed families in locations of their choosing. In addition to “properly” focused images, Lau also created photographs with parts of the image blurred or out of focus, thereby relaying an experience shared by all families: that due to different life spans and circumstances, families are a transient unit subject to constant change.

“Return,” Lau photographed in nursing homes, asking the older folks—unable to leave the nursery homes due to deteriorating health—to pick their favorite location, then going there to take a picture, print it out on a large screen, and portray the nursery home residents and their families in front of a photographic replication.

“Origin,” on the other hand, concerns itself with places more so than people, featuring playgrounds all over different districts of Hong Kong. “Playgrounds are where life begins, they are not only the starting point of a child’s upbringing but also the very first step of their entry into society,” Lau writes in his afterword.

Each of the three series in Home are separated in three different volumes, plus one book with texts by the artists himself as well as essays by Lau Ching-Ping and a short-story by writer Gabriel Wu.

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