In 2009, I started to work on a series of images under the overall title Toronto Myth. Some of these images I re-photographed from my older works, and from family albums or found pictures. I believe this was an extension of a work I did in 2004. A curator from Hong Kong invited me to be part of a 3-person exhibition. The show was about Hong Kong, and was expected to present new works. By that time, I had resided in Toronto for few years and obviously didn’t have many new images of Hong Kong. The solution was for me to re-photograph and transform some of the photographs I had taken during the previous 20 years when I was in Hong Kong. This provided me with a new perspective on cities and some new interpretations of the urban idea.
The original Toronto Myth project was to be a suite of 3000 images. Once they were finished, they were to be presented as moving images, in a never-ending loop. An individual image would now be similar to a small dot in a huge array of thousands of photos on the wall. Here, individual image might not be centrally important, but would somehow contribute to the texture and density of the whole thing undertaking.
Toronto writer Gary Michael Dault saw some of the images in progress and suggested writing a brief text for each image. Once that began, the Toronto Myth project moved into a new chapter. On the other hand, I did come to abandon the aggressive 3000 images concept.
Every few days, I would email Gary three images. Shortly thereafter, he would supply three prose-poem texts, and I would post them online. From 2009 to 2013, there appeared 117 pairs of images and texts.
Toronto Myth
http://torontomyth.blogspot.com