Despite being a video director for a decade, Green Mok (b. 1987 in Hong Kong) has been working with friends and communicating with strangers on gay dating apps in the past few years, he then photographed them at Hong Kong public gay cruising spots at night, creating a series named Dancing in the dark: a certain time at certain places (2019-2020).
Before the intertwinement of technology and romance, gay men were mainly only able to create their sense of community by meeting each other at particular gay cruising parks. In the age of dating apps, however, accessible yet inconspicuous spots are transformed into new gay cruising sites by a brief back and forth conversation on online platforms. Even when Mok’s models were engaging in erotic acts, the presentation is not necessarily sexually explicit under the artist’s camera lens. Some works were taken in a children's playground, the models were posing naively, from bending over in between the swings with their bottom facing the viewer, to poking their heads into the interior of the slide that mimics how Alice in the Wonderland falls into the rabbit hole. Some stand and pose among the trees and along the pathway, indulging in sexual pleasure or waiting for their erotic encounter.
The models’ performative language symbolises their endless search for queer utopia in a site of innocence through exhibitionism, voyeurism, and fetishism. By letting sexual desire dance in the dark, Mok reveals how gay cruising with the aid of modern technology becomes a contemporary subversion of highly neoliberal and privatised public spaces in Hong Kong.
