Artist Meets Archive #4: Jimmi Wing Ka Ho

In the organizer's words:

Invisible City - An artistic intervention in the permanent exhibition

How visible is a city's colonial past? The artist Jimmi Wing Ka Ho addresses this question in the exhibition Invisible City, a photographic and filmic search for traces in the Chinese metropolis of Qingdao. Qingdao was under German colonial rule from 1898 to 1914 - a chapter whose traces can still be seen today in the cityscape and in the culture of remembrance.

Based on around 200 historical photographs from the archive of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, which were once intended to idealize colonial urban planning, the artist sets out in search of the invisible: suppressed stories, superimposed memories and the myths surrounding the colonial legacy. In Qingdao, he created new photographic and video works that place these historical images in a contemporary, personal and at the same time critical context.

The exhibition is divided into three chapters. It begins with a look at a seemingly unknown city whose identity is only gradually revealed as today's Qingdao - a city that was under German colonial rule between 1898 and 1914.

The second part focuses on the colonial infrastructure. The sewage system in particular plays a role - a place that is still shrouded in myth to this day.

The third part takes visitors through Qingdao today. In photographs, they encounter the city as a polyphonic place in which the colonial past, tourist staging and personal memories are interwoven.

With Invisible City, the artist creates a counter-narrative to colonial historiography - and understands archives not as places of objective truth, but as spaces in which history is constantly renegotiated. Photography here becomes a tool for visualization and an invitation to question our view of the past and present in equal measure.

Cologne is also part of this history: street names such as Lansstraße, Iltisstraße or Takustraße still remind us today - mostly unnoticed - of those involved in colonial violence. Invisible City invites visitors to see the city as a living archive and to actively participate in a critical culture of remembrance.

The exhibition is part of the Artist Meets Archive program of the International Photoscene Cologne. For the fourth time, international artists will meet photographic collections from Cologne institutions. The aim of the programme is to open up archives, question them and re-contextualize them.

Artist Meets Archive 2024/2025 is a cooperation project between the International Photoscene Cologne, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, the Museum Ludwig, the Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur and the Dombauarchiv.

The artist

Jimmi Wing Ka Ho (*1993 in Hong Kong) is a visual artist and documentary photographer. He graduated from the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery (London), Horikawa Oike Gallery (Kyoto) and the Hong Kong Photobook Festival, among others. In 2021/22 he received the Royal Photographic Society Postgraduate Scholarship and was nominated for the C/O Berlin Talent Award. His series "So Close and Yet So Far Away" from 2019 to 2023 takes viewers on a journey through Hong Kong's colonial and migration history and through various archives.