Fractal Cities
2023 · 3m · Hong Kong
Directed by Haotian Zhang
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Hong Kong flats, estates and tunnel shelters are scanned, folded and morphed into a drifting point-cloud city where big and small, inside and outside, stop behaving.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Zhang takes the most visually obvious material—Hong Kong's suffocating density—and refuses to make a political statement about it; instead she lets the geometry eat itself, which is either profound or a beautiful cop-out, and I'm genuinely unsure which means it's working.
The lineage here is precise: algorithmic abstraction meets the phenomenology of inhabited space, executed with the formal rigor of post-digital cinema that knows exactly what it owes to both Vertov and contemporary 3D scanning aesthetics.
The decision to let the point-cloud morph continuously rather than cut between states—that single choice of continuity over montage—transforms what could be a technical demonstration into something that actually *feels* like watching a city lose its structural integrity in real time.