Liam Wong

For photographer, director and game designer Liam Wong, the city takes on a different character after midnight. His photographs capture urban environments filled with neon signs, rain-soaked streets, passing trains and the glow of shopfronts, transforming familiar places into scenes that feel almost cinematic. Tokyo is a recurring subject, photographed not as a collection of landmarks but through the fleeting moments and details that emerge when much of the city has gone quiet.

Born and raised in Scotland, Wong moved to Canada after graduating in Computer Arts. In 2015, while working as a visual director at Ubisoft, the video game company behind Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, he bought his first DSLR camera during a trip to Japan. What began as a way to document his travels soon developed into Tokyo Nights, a photography series that attracted a worldwide audience online and established his distinctive visual style.

Wong’s images draw on the visual language of science fiction, cyberpunk and Japanese animation. The influence of films such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, alongside the work of its visual futurist Syd Mead, can be seen in his use of saturated colour, dramatic contrast and dense urban settings. Neon pinks, electric blues and deep reds spill across wet pavements, while buildings, traffic and signs form compositions that resemble stills from a film set in the near future.

Yet the scenes themselves are real. Wong photographs existing streets and buildings, then uses colour, light and post-production to heighten their atmosphere. His background in video game design informs this approach: at Ubisoft, his role involved establishing the visual identity of games, translating their ideas into images that communicate a particular mood and world. In his photography, he applies a similar attention to composition and visual consistency, creating images that sit somewhere between documentary photography and an imagined cinematic landscape.

Despite their carefully constructed appearance, Wong’s photographs often begin with patience and observation. In Minutes To Midnight, taken on a rainy night in Shimbashi, Tokyo, a man carrying an umbrella walks towards the camera through a narrow alley. Reflections illuminate the wet ground, while a train passes in the background. Wong waited in the rain for around an hour to capture the moment when the figure, the light and the surrounding architecture came together.

These small encounters give the photographs a sense of narrative without explaining exactly what is happening. A person crossing a street, a taxi waiting outside a building or a train disappearing into the night becomes the focal point of a much larger urban scene. Wong has described his aim as capturing real moments and transforming them into something surreal, allowing viewers to question what they are seeing. The people in his photographs are often incidental to the setting, but their presence gives the architecture scale and the city a sense of life beyond the frame.

In Memories of Green, Wong draws more directly on the world of Blade Runner. Inspired by a scene in the film in which people cycle through a street, he listened to Vangelis’s track “Memories of Green” and used the combination of image and music as a starting point for the work. The result connects photography with the atmosphere of cinema and sound, showing how a particular scene or piece of music can shape the way a place is imagined.

The project reflects a broader interest in the relationship between images and other visual forms. Wong’s photographs are not simply records of where he has been; they are informed by the films, games, music and animation that have shaped his imagination. This is also what gives his work its distinctive tension: the locations are recognisable, yet the colour and atmosphere make them feel as though they belong to another time or reality.

The response to Wong’s early Tokyo photographs led to his first photobook, TO:KY, published in 2019. The book brings together his images of the city and includes contributions by game creator Hideo Kojima and Syd Mead, connecting Wong’s photography to the wider worlds of game design and science fiction. It became the UK’s largest crowdfunded book at the time of its release, establishing his work beyond social media.

His second book, AFTER DARK, followed in 2022, extending his exploration of cities and their nocturnal atmosphere. Across both publications, Wong returns to the details that make urban environments feel vivid and unfamiliar: reflections on glass, illuminated signs, layers of architecture and the contrast between artificial light and darkness. His work has also developed through collaborations with artists, filmmakers, musicians and brands, as well as projects across photography, film and video games.

Wong’s career brings together disciplines that are often treated separately. His experience in game development informs the way he builds a visual identity, while photography gives him a way to work with real places, unpredictable moments and changing conditions. Rain, in particular, is a recurring element: it intensifies reflections, deepens colour and turns ordinary streets into layered compositions of light and movement.

The result is a body of work in which cities become worlds of their own. Whether photographing Tokyo or developing projects inspired by science fiction, Wong balances close observation with a strong sense of visual direction. His images invite viewers to look again at places they might otherwise pass through, finding something unfamiliar in the everyday landscape.