A connoisseur of modern art and culture, Michael Wolf is a photographer who captures the contemporary urban landscapes, both in the East and the West.

Michael's work is the result of his cross cultural upbringing.

Born in the Germany, he grew up in the US and Canada, studied photography in Germany again, only to pursue a long drawn career in the fiels in Asia.

To tag his body of work singularly, is hard but his themes mostly hark on graphic representation of cities and their changing landscape, architecture and so on.

Starting off as a photojournalist with a German Magazine, he chanced upon his first project in China's toy factory. Touring the flea markets, he collected nearly 20,000 toys "made in China" for an installation- calling it the "Real Toy Story". The work brought out the reality of factory system and West's unending gloabalization fetish.

However, his most famous work is Hong Kong's "brutal architecture". Using the sky-scraping buildings as the tool of his works, fused in the midst of concrete are minutely captured details like a shirt flying off the balcony in the closely packed buildings.

Showing a individual sharpness to visualize the vernacular rather than the glitz, that often symbolize city life, Wolf's work reflects is a right mix of post-industrial societies. He tries to draw a parallel with the developed American cities and Eastern cultures- both victims of everchanging "man-altered landscape".

In another set of work titled "Real Fake Art", he subtly takes a dig at the development and consumerist paradigm of global economies. Provoking a sensible thought about value of art in the era of mass productions, the graphics show "the multi-million dollar business that has developed in china for copying major pieces of modern art, from francis bacon to andy warhol, principally for export to the west".

By 2006, Wolf added a new tangent to his vision. Moving away from the depiction of Chinese vernacular culture, he captured Chicago. Applying the same visual framework as to Hong Kong, he found Chicago's tall arching landscape more uncluttered to capture the details more cleanly.

You can catch some of his works here that we found absolutely fascinating


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