An iconic photographer of the past three decades, Wolfgang Tillmans remains an innovator, fueled by his expansive curiosity and engagement with the worlds of science and environmentalism, politics and culture, fashion and art. He has even returned to making music after a nearly 30-year hiatus with the release of an EP, 2016 / 1986, in 2016, and live concerts with his band Fragile. A solo show by Tillmans opened at David Zwirner Hong Kong in late March, and was an occasion for the photographer to make an exhibition in a city that he was revisiting for the first time since 1993. Additionally, Tillmans debuted several large-scale landscape images, of the sea and the Sahara desert, and portraits of figures that reflected not only his recent travels but the conversations he has been having about the state of the world today. I spoke with the photographer ten days after the exhibition’s opening about his approach to presenting works, his process, as well as solar eclipses.

For your exhibition at David Zwirner Hong Kong, and for the accompanying catalog, you introduced new and recent images alongside specific older images, from either a few years ago or even several decades ago. What is your approach to making an exhibition? Do you bring a lot of photographs with you and edit and arrange them while you're in the space? Or do you have a very specific idea of which works you will show and how they relate to one another? 

I start by building an architectural model of the exhibition space in my studio about a month before the exhibition and use that for my thinking process. The model is not prescriptive—it’s not a plan that has to be stuck to. It’s actually there to allow me the freedom to do whatever I want in the gallery. But of course I can only play with the work that I have shipped. Over the years, the layout of the works in the model has become so precise that I now sometimes follow it exactly on the gallery walls. Other parts of the exhibition are completely done on the spot and are developed over several days. 

It’s an organic process that took the better part of a week in Hong Kong. I worked during the day and late into the night until everything found its place. Each picture has a sound in my imagination. The smallest images and the biggest ones are not so different in their importance. They hang together, and when it’s done I never feel, “Oh, I wish I could change this now.” It’s kind of then settled and good.

I was very struck by how, in the exhibition and catalog, you updated certain images of Hong Kong, such as Hong Kong, Phillipinas on Street (1993), from an earlier trip of yours, with new depictions of the same phenomenon, as in Playing Cards, Hong Kong (2018), while the show also spanned different aspects of your practice. 

I don’t always reference the city or place I am showing in, because that’s not the way I work. It happens naturally when I’m interested in a place. In this case, going to Hong Kong in 1993 was my first Asian experience—my first time outside the Western world—so it left a deep impression on me. It made me realize how much I don’t understand. I included those pictures in my first book, published by Taschen in 1995, which was seen as documentation of my world, when in fact, these Hong Kong images were clearly not my world. They were placeholders for all the things that I didn’t know about, but was curious about. And then I didn’t have contact again with Hong Kong for 25 years until I came back in January. Hong Kong is this special island in an authoritarian system. I find it touching—that’s why I took pictures of it.

On the one hand, my work is constantly evolving, but there are also interests that are continuous, such as borders—including country borders, but also the fabric of communities as a border with the outside world—and congregations of people spending time together, particularly outside of commercial spaces. I realized the figure of the Filipinas, gathering on Sundays, is a very different congregation than, say a festival in the West, but the visual effect is similar. 

In the show, there are several images from the United States of the total solar eclipse in August 2017. It seems as if you traveled specifically to see it. I'm curious why you gravitated towards this event, and if there is something about an eclipse as an optical phenomenon that interests you as a photographer?

Yes. There are three pictures from Illinois. There's also a portrait at the bottom of the gallery's stairs—a video I shot on the Faroe Islands during a total solar eclipse in 2015 was playing in the background when I took the photo in Kinshasa. The total solar eclipse in Illinois in 2017 was my sixth. I’ve been tracking them for the last 20 years. I have always visited them to experience them as physical and personal experiences. I never use a telescope; I want to see them with my eyes. And then I take a few photographs each time. It’s not something I necessarily want to photograph but it’s such an incredible experience. 

When I was a ten-year-old boy, I had such an obsession with astronomy, which reigned my life until I was about 14. For four years I was mad—all and everything had to do with astronomy. I learned the power and the importance of exact observation, the impossibility of seeing everything, and the lens playing tricks on you or the brain affecting what the eyes see. This sense of certainty that a lot of people have, I have questioned from early on by constantly trying to see what is at the very edge of what’s visible. For almost 30 years, I dreamed about a total eclipse—I knew it would happen in Europe, in 1999, which of course then seemed miles away. 

But in ’98, I saw my first one in the Caribbean. It’s a very unique color experience. The evening is associated with a shift in color. We don’t really notice it, but the brain understands it—it goes dark because it’s evening. During a total eclipse, everything goes darker but at the same time is in exactly the same color. It’s very strange. And in the five minutes before totality, there is an exponential drop in light, which is absolutely overwhelming. 

You can hear from my description I care very much about color. You have to look at all the walls, the color composition within the pictures—colors matter. Light temperature, which ultimately is color, is something I very carefully record and print. All of my work is about seeing, and the recording and translation of that onto paper, which is a very different thing from seeing. 

In contrast to the eclipse photos, your CLC images are entirely about digital processes. Could you explain CLC—what it is and its technology—as well as your history with using it in your works? 

CLC stands for Canon laser copier. Canon was the first company in the late ’80s to bring out a digital, black-and-white and then color photocopier. Back then it was revolutionary technology. It caught my artistic attention. The photocopier became my primary medium when I was 20—this ability to make new works through a purely mechanical medium was a big revelation to me. In my teens, I was painting, drawing and making music, clothes and things. And then I realized that I could speak the best through digital, mechanical prints. This potential of the photocopier to make new pictures has been with me for 30 years. When I won the Turner Prize in 2000, I used the money to buy my own color laser copier. 

This is a machine that scans in four layers, so the color picture is separated in CMYK. Nowadays—and this has been the case for the last ten years—no machine does that anymore, everything is only scanned once. I used this process, of the four scans, to make new shapes and color mixtures, together with text pieces that stem from the project, “Truth Study Center,” which I have been working on since 2005. For that project, I look to studies of the brain and the processing of lying and perceptions of truth.

The words in these CLC works are almost a bowing to the form of language. What does print look like? What do words look like printed? It’s a way to make non-figurative and yet figurative pictures, in a continuation of my other abstract work. 

What part of the process in the scanning do the images represent? And is there some kind of parallel between the scanner and the human-thought process that is suggested through these works?  

The images tell us that the scanner touched the same surface four times—if you can think of light “touching” or “feeling”—this results in four different outcomes. That in itself is a fascinating possibility—in different colors, the scanner sees different things. 

I don’t see the images as depicting or illustrating anything in particular. I always felt my work should not illustrate anything because otherwise, you might as well write it out or talk about it. It's always the things that I can’t quite put into words that I try to do with visuals. But there are exceptions, particularly in this print from 2017, which says, “How likely is it that only I am right in this matter?”—that is a sentence I wrote, which makes the work slightly different from the ones that use studies and scientific papers as source materials. It acknowledges the fact that words have become a stronger part of what I do, in the same way that music has; after a 28-year pause, I picked up making music again. This was of course out of an interest in sound, but it’s also very much an interest in words. 

Words are very prominent in your posters for the anti-Brexit campaign. There are images that accompany the texts. How did you negotiate the relationship between the two in this more explicit context?

I had ideas for anti-racist, anti-rightwing posters and distribution ten years ago, but it never came to anything, because I could never find the words. There was a sense of embarrassment, which is what ultimately what holds me back a lot of the time. Of course it’s good protection, but in recent years, I felt that I had found the words. In the case of Brexit, it was very clear. One day I realized that nobody is speaking in favor of the European Union. Even the remain camp were not speaking positively about the EU. Is it so unloved and so un-cool? 

I wanted to speak positively about it, as the largest peace project of humankind—something that is worth protecting. And then this combination of pictures and text came about. I did not see this as an art project. I undertook it as the action of a European citizen who has lived most of his life between England and Germany. It was self-defense in a moment of emergency. People around me didn’t see the problem. They just thought, “This is not going to happen. Of course we are going to stay.” People were thinking, “What is he so anxious about?” 

I just knew this is totally serious. Maybe as an outsider who has lived in the UK for 25 years, I could see how the Murdoch press and the conservative press, which is owned by three billionaires—none of whom pay proper taxes in Britain—have subjected people to misinformation and hate campaigns about the EU for the better part of 25 years. This populism and now nationalism in the UK has been fanned systematically for decades. As much as I love the UK, I’ve always been worried about that.

HG Masters is ArtAsiaPacific’s editor-at-large.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ solo exhibition is on view at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, until May 12, 2018.

• Germany
• Hong Kong