Dear Franklin

Through vintage images, press clippings, letters—correspondence between an engaged couple—and photographs, artist Kurt Tong constructs a fictional narrative about a man from a poor Hong Kong family who falls in love with the daughter of a Kuomintang general. Caught up in the turmoil of political events, Franklin Lung and his fiancée endure the ravages of war, exile, and the challenges of acculturation. The book unfolds the twists and turns of a passionate romance that touches on universal themes; here, "micro-history" resonates with major contemporary societal issues such as armed conflict, migration, separation, and loss.

Kurt Tong claims to have discovered an antique chest filled with love letters, portraits, dried flowers, and Chinese and Japanese newspapers and magazines from the 1940s. As the pages turn, the daily lives of the two protagonists—lovers kept apart by circumstance—are revealed. The book can be read in the traditional manner, from left to right, where the exchange of letters and photographs sketches out the characters' destinies much like a serialized novel; yet it can also be read from right to left, unfolding the political and social history of China during the first half of the 20th century. Bound with alternating page widths, the work offers a dual reading experience: part romantic fiction, part historical archive. Acting as archivist, poet, novelist, and historian, Kurt Tong shatters the boundaries of the photography book. Its rich imagery, literary approach, and historical vision—blending past and present, fiction and reality—redefine the concept of the "artist's book."