Mandarin and Her Route 41

A collaborative creation by image-based artist Michelle Chan and writer Clementine Hei-man Cheung, Mandarin and Her Route 41 is an artist’s book that presents a delicate dance between photography and fictional text, choreographed around an anchoring motif of Hong Kong’s bus Route 41.

As an accompanying programme to the exhibition German Photo Book Award, we are glad to invite Michelle Chan and Clementine Cheung to share with us their journey of self publishing a photo book in Hong Kong.

About the book:
With Route 41 serving as both the muse and metaphor, Michelle’s realist documentations, including images of landscape and portraits of found artefacts along the now-defunct route are reinterpreted by Clementine. Michelle diarised her walks along the original route by photographing the landscapes with expired film, and elevated found objects into still-life portraits within a traditional studio along the route. Inspired by the 41 found objects, Clementine has threaded a 41-chapter fictional narrative that reimagines the seaside Wah Fu Estate from the 1960s to ’90s, in which Route 41 represents a perpetual and lingering vessel, bearing witness to Hong Kong and her people.

About the authors: Michelle Chan (@little.rice) is a relational artist whose practice centres on photography, text, and books as forms of connection. Through collaborative processes, she works with participants to explore everyday experiences, memory, and shared narratives. Her recent projects include books of qi and Kaufu, and her earlier works have also been transformed into zines and books. Her latest collaborative project, Mandarin and Her Route 41, is an artist photo-text book self-published in 2026.

She is the founder of 1:1 studio and co-founder of Phoboko, where she curates exhibitions and reading rooms, and facilitates workshops and gatherings that position photobooks as spaces for dialogue, connection, and collective exchange. She served as a jury member for the Photobook Dummy Award and Photozine Award at the 3rd Hong Kong Photobook Festival (2025). Recently, she facilitates participatory workshops that work with the book not only as an object but as a score for participation: content acts as the score, pages become spaces for engagement that hold a collective story, idea, or feeling, making the book itself become a site of encounter and relation-making.
  Clementine Hei-man Cheung is a Hong Kong–based writer, copywriter, and translator. Attentive to the subtle and sacred qualities of everyday life, she distills mundane observations into bilingual fiction and prose. Her self-published works include Mandarin and Her Route 41 and The Last of Us: Wandering on the Remaining Beams, alongside other works. She is developing new writing and publishing projects, such as Man Wan Kee and Agape One.

Her writing has been featured in LIKE A FEVER and Ming Pao. Beyond the page, Cheung contributes to creative and community initiatives, including as a facilitator for Make A Difference (MaD) programmes and as a commissioned artist for the Sai Kung Hoi Arts Festival 2023 and deTour 2022.