Sze Tsung Nicolas Leong: Paris, Novembre

On the night of 13 November 2015, Paris was convulsed by a series of coordinated attacks. Sze Tsung Nicolás Leong, not far from the strikes, did not consider taking photographs, weighed on not only by the difficulty of depicting a city already so exhaustively pictured, but more so by the impossibility of representing such tragedy. The next day Leong, wandering the city in the aftermath of the events, turned his camera downward to the ground, focusing on an aspect of the city we repeatedly look at yet largely do not notice. The resulting photos render a seemingly known city strange and unfamiliar. At first appear - ing to be abstractions or even aerials or views of the cosmos, they reveal specific details we would otherwise miss and which contain gravity in their apparent banality―from cigarettes left on the asphalt by mourners, to the footprints and broken glass of the night before, and the sawdust scattered on the sidewalks soaking up blood.

Paris, Novembre is a portrait of a city at a traumatic moment in its history and an exploration of how that history leaves its marks on the city’s ground. Leong’s series is a gesture of mourning and contempla - tion, seemingly of nothing and the reluctance to look, yet at the same time of looking closely and intently.

'In the past, astrologers scrutinized the sky to understand the world. Leong scrutinizes the ground. Is he also looking to read some message in these images that he literally picks up from the earth? As if the ground were the key, the terminus on which all converges.' -Thierry Grillet