A Trip through Virtuality & Physicality with an Orange

The print depicts an orange rendered through cyanotype — an alternative photographic process in which ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide react under UV exposure to produce a Prussian blue image. The 'Virtuality & Physicality' framing of the series suggests Fung works from a digitally captured or composited source image of the fruit, output as a transparency for contact printing, then returns the orange's actual hue to the surface by hand-colouring after the chemistry has set. The result is a dialogue between the cool blue photographic ground and warm applied pigment, with the painted layer registering against, rather than within, the photographic image. The work continues Fung's investigation, developed since his Postgraduate Diploma in Photography and Advertising at the London College of Printing (1987–1989), into where alternative photographic process meets fine-art printmaking. As co-founder of the Hong Kong Open Printshop (HKOP) in 2000, he has sustained a studio context in which darkroom chemistry and hand-finished printmaking are treated as a single continuous discipline rather than separate fields.