Preston Hartwick is a visual artist who grew up in Hong Kong and has lived on Cheung Chau Island since 2014. With photography as his primary medium, his work frequently takes the form of long-term investigations of his surrounding landscape and its continuous reshaping through natural and human intervention.

His ongoing project, Hong Kong Aesthetic, is a decade-long counter archive of Hong Kong’s undocumented design — the colors, textures, and patterns that comprise the city’s underlying visual fabric.

Preston was selected as a featured artist for the Inter-Island Festival 2023, where he designed an installation re-interpreting the controversial Lantau Tomorrow Vision reclamation project as a figment of a failed technocratic fantasy.

He published his first photobook, Bela Vista, in 2021, chronicling six years of observing the interplay between ocean, people, and animals contained within the field of view from a single window overlooking the beach.

Before this, Preston’s photography and sculptural installations have been featured in multiple exhibitions across Hong Kong. He has an intense love for analog photography and can usually be found in his darkroom experimenting with historical photographic processes.