British photographer Chris Shaw, who spent ten years working as a night porter in various hotels before launching his photographic career (incl. exhibitions at Tate Britain and Moscow Museum of Photography), met Japanese artist Tokyo Rumando at the Hongkong Photobook Fair in 2015. Noticing the similarities behind their work, Shaw and Rumando decided to collaborate on a series, in which, as Shaw tells, “she would be Tokyo Rumando and I would be ‘night porter’.” The erotic photographs in this photobook show Tokyo Rumando show the result of that collaboration, the city of Hongkong always looking in on Tokyo through the hotel windows.

“There were some magic moments, and we share some of those with you through this book.”

— from Chris Shaw’s statement

Artist Profile

Chris SHAW

Chris Shaw completed his degree in Audio Visual studies at West Surrey College of Art & Design (now University for the Creative Arts) from 1986–89. In his 2006 monograph “Life as a Night Porter” (Twin Palms, 2006), Shaw published photographs of strange events he witnessed over a ten-year period between 1993 to 2004 whilst working as a night porter at a few hotels in London. His other books include “Before and After Night Porter” (Kehrer, 2012), “Weeds of Wallasey” (Superlabo, 2013), “Horizon Icon” (Adad, 2015), “Retrospecting Sandy Hill” (Morel Books, 2015), “Tokyo in Hong Kong” (Zen Foto Gallery, 2018), and “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” (Zen Foto Gallery, 2019).

Chris is represented in public collections of The Tate in London, Frac Des Pays de la Loire in Nantes and Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg. Chris held his first solo show in Cafe Tabac in Bold Street, Liverpool in 1991. Since then he has held numerous exhibitions in Paris, London, Stockholm, Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.