Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks changed New York’s skyline forever, a Hong Kong show is taking viewers back to a quieter time. It was an age when the Twin Towers were not yet symbols of loss. They were simply part of daily life.
HKI Gallery’s The World Trade Centre: Before Memory brings together black-and-white images by Hong Kong artist Gretchen So. She made them on medium-format film in the early 1990s. The show runs from 1 September to 31 October 2026. The current exhibition listing confirms the dates, venue and photographic format.
The idea is simple, but the effect is strong. Rather than treat the World Trade Centre as a grand monument, So shows the towers as part of the city around them.
Before history changed the view
So shot from streets, bridges, waterfronts and places beyond Manhattan. In some frames, the towers fill the skyline. In others, they sit quietly in the distance while New York carries on below.
“When I took these photographs, I was simply observing what was around me,” says So. “There was no intention to memorialize anything. Yet the Twin Towers kept appearing somewhere in the frame. They were not necessarily the subject, but they were part of the rhythm of the city and woven into the everyday lives of the people who lived there.”
That quotation has been retained exactly as published in the current HKI Gallery exhibition listing.
That is what gives the images their force today. Famous buildings do not spend every hour looking famous. They become office addresses, meeting points and signs for cab drivers. They are also part of the view for people hurrying home.
Then history changed everything.
A decade after So took the images, the attacks of 11 September 2001 destroyed the Twin Towers. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum records that 2,977 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks in New York, at the Pentagon and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The memorial also honours the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.
She was studying Arts Administration at Columbia University and living in New York when the 2001 attacks took place. Her older work then gained a meaning no photographer could have planned. Her background in the Columbia program is also recorded in published material about her career.
When a photograph becomes history
That shift sits at the heart of Before Memory. The negatives have not changed. The buildings in them have not changed. The viewer has.
Seen in 2026, the images work in several ways. They show street life. They study buildings and public space. They also form an unplanned record of a New York that no longer exists in the same form.
There is no need for heavy drama. The knowledge of what happened later is already in every frame.
The show also fits So’s long interest in people and cities. Her official archive records earlier displays of the World Trade Centre series in Hong Kong in 2011 and Wellington in 2014. Her current artist statement recalls taking images of the towers from New Jersey, Queens and Brooklyn.
A neat link connects Hong Kong and New York, too. Both cities have skylines that help define them. Buildings rise, streets change, and whole districts find new lives. What feels ordinary one day can become history the next.
That makes The World Trade Centre: Before Memory more than an anniversary show. It is also about the way cities live in memory. It asks how familiar places change once we know they are gone.
For travellers, photographers and anyone drawn to New York’s story, the show carries unusual weight. The images do not shout. They do not need to. Three decades of history have already done that work.
Exhibition details
The World Trade Centre: Before Memory runs from 1 September to 31 October 2026 at HKI Gallery, 12D Derrick Industrial Building, 49 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Hong Kong. Both the exhibition organiser and the building owner have independently confirmed the address.
Opening hours: Tuesday–Saturday, noon–6.30 pm, except public holidays
Admission: Free
The gallery’s Wong Chuk Hang premises also list the same Tuesday- Saturday opening schedule.
Gretchen So official website
Official exhibition listing
National September 11 Memorial & Museum
By: Susan Ng – © 2026.
Read Time: 3 minutes.
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