Discover a different perspective on Hong Kong’s temples through “The Art of Celestials”

Hong Kong has a vast collection of art and cultural exhibitions for people to visit, and one that may have flown under the radar is Dickie Fowler’s (aka Dickie Suzuki) “The Art of Celestials,” which is currently on show at the HKCACC Gallery in Sheung Wan until February 25. The exhibition is made up of 35 portraits of deities taken by Suzuki as he captured the magical stories behind each.  

A British photographer but video producer by trade, Suzuki has lived in Hong Kong since 1989. When the pandemic hit, he was left without much work and decided to turn back to his passion for photography. 

“I was satiating my wanderlust by traveling to all the places in Hong Kong that I hadn’t been,” Suzuki said to SCMP. “I hadn’t realized what I’d missed until I started looking deliberately.”

While rediscovering Hong Kong, he came across thousands of vibrant statues of deities across temples and shrines scattered throughout the city. One site he visited is “A Sky Full of Gods and Buddhas” in Waterfall Bay Park in Pok Fu Lam on Hong Kong Island’s western shore. It’s a collection of thousands of statues of deities that, legend has it, was started by a gentleman named Mr. Wong Wing-Pong. It’s considered bad luck in Hong Kong to throw away religious figurines, so a lot of them end up abandoned. The story goes that Mr. Wong would collect any of these statues he came across, fix them up and add them to the collection in the park. Nowadays, people might even bring their own unneeded religious statues to join the collection at the park, so it’s continued to grow and grow over the years.   

“I realized that a lot of people just don’t understand what’s going on inside the temples,” Suzuki said. “They go once as a tourist, but then they don’t revisit these places. They don’t realize how many magical stories that are contained within and the absolute beauty of these effigies, which have decades, if not centuries, of patina. All that wear and tear really adds to their luster, in my opinion.”

So, if you’re a lover of photography or someone who’s visited a temple once and not found too much meaning behind it, go check out “The Art of Celestials” exhibition to see this side of Hong Kong culture from a new perspective.