Though the book itself is dense, the cover of Basil Pao’s Carnival of Dreams, a monographic retrospective of the photographer’s 50-year career, evokes weightlessness. An acrobat somersaults impossibly high against an endless sky, framed on both sides and below by downy cumulus clouds brushed with pink and baby blues. There is no ground in sight; his body, horizontal, gazing upwards, is dwarfed by the grandiosity of his environment.
There is no sense of danger, as the acrobat hovers near the top of the image, it feels as though he just might keep ascending, that he has become as weightless as the clouds. His figure is unbound by the physics of this space because, of course, this is not a space to which he belongs — the work itself is a photomontage, a composite image made from different sources. The image of the acrobat floats on the surface of the sky — unbounded, isolated, and unreal.
It is within this same weightless, substanceless, fantastical non-space that many of Pao’s images exist. The book, published in 2023 by Studio 8 Editions and Hong Kong University, spans a career that is equally vast, and explores Pao’s journey from cut and paste collages to digitally constructed photomontages.
The Hong Kong-born photographer is most well known for his decades-long collaboration with television presenter Michael Palin on his travel shows, Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole. Pao took over 30,000 photographs for Palin on his journeys, and his works have been published in large anthologies with glossy spreads. Carnival of Dreams is obviously inspired by Pao’s trade as a travel photographer, but the photographs are much more fantastical.
Pao collapses time, space, and geography across lushly arranged and often overstimulating images. In dialogue with his contributions to Around the World and Pole to Pole, many aspects of these works feel cut from the world of travel magazines, possessing a distinct airbrushed sheen. These works exhibit but do little to fully address the exoticising gaze of the travel photographer, joining global landmarks and cultures with recognizable art historical iconography.
An elderly woman dressed in indigenous Central American garb stands beneath a large green apple lightly inscribed with Chinese calligraphy in an homage to René Magritte’s surrealist compositions (“The Postcard”). A little Black girl holds a red bucket over her head in front of a multi-story parking garage clogged with vehicles (“Use Your Head”). A Chinese woman on stilts performs a fan dance in a desert-like grove of barren trees while a group of white schoolchildren look on (“The Cai Gao’qiao Giant of Dogon”).
There is an intriguing tackiness to these images, all of them tinted with a facade of multiculturalism that crumbles against their obviously constructed natures. They are impossible, fantastical realms pieced together from the pages of a magazine.
Pao’s works call into question the way images shape our sense of identity, evoking a globalism that complicates to an overwhelming spill of images. Many of his later digital works feel slightly sinister — beyond Pao’s use of the visibly “foreign” as shorthand for the “dreamlike” and “exotic,” the looming unreality of these compositions feels ominous.
In his introduction to his “Carnival of Dreams” series, he references the precarious, synthetic worlds of virtual reality and artificial intelligence as inspirations for his series. The obvious fakeness of these images communicate anxiety about what is true and what is fabricated. Common within these works are references to how things are framed — pictures within pictures, mirrors that reflect nothing, windows that reveal false environments, realities that tunnel into infinity in futile search for a clear truth.
Pao frames his “Carnival of Dreams” as an escape, a representation of a “collective unconscious.” However, the style of images that he pulls from are very much grounded in real life. Whether intentional or not, Carnival of Dreams becomes commentary on the language of mainstream travel documentation, and how what is “foreign” is often made to stand in for what is outlandish, strange, and dreamlike. While the photomontages are visually stimulating and trace a formidable career deeply rooted in global events and spaces and art historical inspirations, the commentary they offer feels light and almost as substanceless as the clouded world that the acrobat traverses on the book’s cover.
