About Singapore – Page 4 – Hong Kong Lucida

Singapore’s Geylang Serai

Posted on August 29, 2014August 27, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour

This post is one month late (and eleven months early).

The photographs here were taken in late July, one or two days before Hari Raya Puasa, a religious festival celebrated by Malay Muslims in Singapore at the end of the fasting month.

My wife decided we should join in the festivities and so here we were at Geylang Serai. We had a fantastic dinner.

The lady who took our order.

There was a long line in front of the cashier but it’s good as I got to take quite a few photographs.

So yes, we were at the Kampong Cafe.

Finally – the front of the queue.

Yummy roti john!

Yummy spicy shrimp rolls!

I can’t figure out what she’s holding – it’s pastry…

Yummy er … roti john?

Yummy fried vadai!

Yummy pancake!

More vadai!

It is really possible for one to be hungry again just after dinner.

Yummy kebab!

Food is meant to be eaten.

Okay – this is my wife’s favorite part of the bazaar… lots of textiles.

Lots of cloth frilly fabric-ish things…

Dress things.

He was carving a small figurine.

A carpet auction in progress.

Prices start at S$200.

Very colourful drinks …

Thanks for reading!

Check out my Saatchi Art page!

Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay

Posted on August 27, 2014August 27, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour

I finally visited Gardens by the Bay.

Check out the cool-looking Supertrees which are vertical gardens.

The above, I suppose, is an obligatory picturesque shot.

It’s a good place for photographers.

Lots of selfie moments.

You don’t really need to think to get a good shot – there’s something to be said about the blending of technology and nature at this place.

Picture-perfect convenient nature (if that’s what you like).

We’re in Flower Dome, one of the 2 conservatories here.

Mummy, daddy and baby cactus.

Phallus cactus.

Eagle photographer.

Eager photographer.

The future of tech and nature.

That’s Cloud Forest, another conservatory.

As I’m walking around, I can’t help but think perhaps this is the future of botany.

Maybe in the next twenty years, we’ll all be living in domes like this.

The temperature is nice though.

That’s the mineral exhibit area. Guess how I took this shot.

I’m a street photography genius…

This takes a lot of work.

Kudos to those who’ve put in the hard work to make this possible.

Oops – my lens fogged up when I stepped out of the conservatory.

I love mistakes like this.

I’m a nature photographer!

This is a nice blend of botany, technology, architecture, commerce, tourism and nation building.

A William Gibson quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

Check out my Saatchi Art page!

Singapore Hawker Food

Posted on August 24, 2014August 22, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour

Hawker food!

It’s definitely one of those things overseas Singaporeans miss.

Here’s my routine whenever I’m back in Singapore:

Step one – in the morning, I’d dutifully go to the wet market, determined to buy some fresh vegetables.

I’m determined to buy those fresh fish.

I really want those fresh meat, yes. Good idea.

And then I’ll buy the newspapers.

Step two: I’ll soak in the atmosphere.

I’ll then look at all those hawker food.

Yummy pancake! You could have either coconut husk, red bean paste or peanut as your filling.

I usually buy one of each. It’s yummy breakfast/tea time/snack food.

Rojak! That’s a fruit and veg salad concoction that manages to be sweet, sour and spicy all at the same time.

A close-up of the rojak stall. It’s a good alternative snack.

You can see that at this point, my health diet plan starts to break down.

Good breakfast food!

I actually look forward to waiting in front of a stall for my food to be ready – it allows me to loiter and wait for the perfect moment.

Unhealthy thick noodle breakfast with sausages, chicken wings, potato wedges, etc etc.

Noodle stall – we’re still at breakfast.

That’s the fried butterfly, you tiao, salted bun, etc etc stall.

Good for brunch.

We’re all waiting with our smartphones these days.

Chicken rice! Good lunch idea.

That’s where I buy my century egg porridge. Lunch.

Killer prawn noodles! Dinner. That’s when I reach for my cholesterol pills.

That’s just rice with a choice of dishes … the sweet and sour pork is usually the best of the lot. Dinner time!

Yong tau foo! Where you choose your ingredients and noodles. I usually go for the dry thick yellow noodle with lots of sweet sauce.

(Again, my cholesterol pills would definitely come in handy.)

The thing about yong tau foo – no matter what you choose, you can’t go wrong.

Ingredients for a wonderful dinner.

There’s no such thing as the wrong kind of food…

Fish ball noodles! Good supper food.

Minced pork noodles! Is it tomorrow’s breakfast yet?

Curry puffs! Goreng pisang (fried bananas)! Good night-time snack.

Oh and I’ll never forget to have some fruits.

Fruits are important for a healthy diet…

Buy my prints!

Singapore Local Culture

Posted on August 22, 2014August 22, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

This is culture as lived experience:

An ordinary life that is the subject of street photography.

Every year I return to Singapore for a period and some things don’t change.

The kacang puteh man is still there (there’s another photo of him in a post a year ago).

I tried another shot and he spotted me.

A cobbler.

And another cobbler.

I stopped to buy my son an ice cream.

When doing street photography, bring along your child – you’ll look less conspicuous that way.

See? This guy actually smiled at my son and I.

I look like I’m helping my son with a school project…

My son dared me to take a picture of him up close – and I did.

And he pointed to them and said it would make a nice photograph – so I obliged.

He didn’t think the above would work – I think he’s right.

And he said the cyclist was looking the wrong way … again he’s right.

“Why did you take a picture of that building, daddy? Is that considered street photography?”

Good question.

I thought the tie fluttering in the air might make this interesting.

He was trying to tack something onto the wood paneling and looked somewhat frustrated – I caught that moment.

That’s life – always under construction.

Thanks for reading.

Check out my open-edition prints at my Saatchi Art page!

Singapore Heartland

Posted on August 20, 2014August 19, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

Heartland is the title of a novel by Daren Shiau.

We don’t meet often, though our paths have crossed a few times at various literary readings/events.

The novel is about the coming of age of a young man who grapples with class disparities, national service (conscription) and romance.

It is also about every Singaporean son…

The heartland is the social-cultural space we grew up in.

For me, it’s what nostalgia is made of.

There is a shiny global Singapore (Gardens by the Bay, Marina Sands, Clarke Quay, etc.), and there’s also the heartland of Singapore we return to in the evenings.

It’s the uncle we see every day, loitering at the void deck.

It’s hawker food!

It’s that uncle on a bicycle I side-stepped to avoid in the morning.

All of that adds up to a sense of community…

And both national and personal growth is a kind of departure, a severing of ties from the past…

We’ll never return to the seesaw of our childhoods again.

Things are too new to be comfortable.

All that unearthing and shifting of foundations…

There’s always work in progress.

Hence all we can do is learn to look back and find a glimmer of our home again in our imagination…

For collectors: open-edition prints are available at my Saatchi Art page.

Thanks for reading!

Singapore: Monochrome Visions

Posted on August 16, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

These pictures were taken around late July/early August, when National Day (9 Aug) was just around the corner.

I was in Singapore for about three weeks, and every single day, I carry at least 2 (and sometimes 3) cameras with me when I’m out and about.

So in a way, this post (and those that come after) is a partial answer to the question of what it is about Singapore I celebrate.

This was at the entrance of City Hall MRT station, and they saw what I was doing and posed for me.

They were holding up the sign to direct people who were going to watch the National Day Parade rehearsals.

It looks like they were posing. They were already in that position and they turned to look at me as I approached.

All the pictures here were taken on a single roll of Kodak BW400CN, on my Minolta AF-C, and as I looked at the negatives, I was amazed to see so many images of Indian and Bangladeshi workers.

In many ways, they are responsible for literally building Singapore.

Singapore is what it is partly because of them.

The physical infrastructure works like a clock partly because of them.

I was walking on a pavement and they were holding grass-cutters, looking at me the whole time.

They were waiting for me to walk past so they could resume work.

And my wife said, quick, quick, take out your camera, and so I did and took the above photo.

Check out the chiaroscuro.

I waved and they nodded and went on with their work.

This is Singapore.

This, too, is Singapore.

Definitely Singapore.

This picture was taken while I was in a queue. Yummy.

She spotted me and smiled.

This too is Singapore.

There were quite a number of soldiers in the area because of the National Day Parade rehearsals, directing crowds and traffic.

I’ve done my share of that when I was an army boy.

Lion City banner – I aimed my camera at the banner, and waited for someone to come along to complete the picture.

Check out the logo on the T-shirt. That’s the crescent and the five stars of the Singapore flag.

Patriotism is in the air.

Is he a tourist or a Singapore resident? You can’t tell these days.

This is a global Singapore.

This was at Little India.

Another take at Little India.

Sometimes I wonder: why do I take street photographs? What is it about street photography, such that I feel compelled to take pictures of strangers?

An answer of sorts:

Because I’m afraid of being conditioned by market forces into thinking of people as mannequins…

Thanks for reading, and check out my prints!

Susan Sontag vs John Berger

Posted on March 15, 2014March 15, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

I am presenting a paper on photography and literature at an academic seminar next Monday at Hong Kong Baptist University, and this is part of what I am going to say:

This is what Susan Sontag says about photography:

like many mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power … Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends and neighbors … Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. (On Photography)

I am thinking of people I know who like to photograph their food before they eat, or of parents who take photographs of their children while they’re playing the piano at home or of their families in front of the Eiffel Tower. There’s nothing wrong with doing these things (I do them myself all the time), but after a while, if we claim to be serious about photography as an art form and yet this is all we do with photography, then it no longer allows us to see anything new. It allows us to see only what we already see, putting us in a state of self-consuming and self-affirming narcissism, saying, “Look at me, look at me”.

But a lot of what Sontag says are provocations to thought as well:

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. (On Photography)

What if we pursue photography with humility, as a way of looking at things differently? John Berger has made the point that “Every photograph presents us with two messages: a message concerning the event photographed and another concerning the shock of discontinuity” (Another Way of Telling). He goes on to say that “Between the moment recorded and the present moment of looking, there is an abyss” ((Another Way of Telling).

The abyss is when the street photograph gives us something we find hard to accept. We look, and look again, and we struggle with the meaning of the scene.

Perhaps, then, this is the moment we enter into the realm of critique…

Searching for Singapore III

Posted on March 11, 2014March 10, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

I suppose this theme is like a visual fixation for me.

This post is dedicated to those who know what it feels like to be doing street photography in your own neighbourhood.

In our own ways, we’re all searching for something, using our cameras as visual search engines.

What are we looking for? For another way to look, to turn everything into a work of art…

I suppose it’s about moments that surprise me.

That tree now looks like an explosion with the HDB flat facade as backdrop…

I keep coming back to HDB flats (public housing that 80-85% of Singaporeans live in), because it’s the cookie-cutter, middle-class, ideological environment I grew up in and which is part of who I am.

For those looking for general info concerning public housing in Singapore, this article from Wikipedia is a good general source. You could purchase these (highly-subsidised) flats through various schemes which are generally pro-marriage, pro-family, pro-heteronormative, etc.

It’s all very Bauhaus-influenced, with a rational/functional ethos to it.

Chua Beng-Huat, a sociologist at NUS, has a wonderful book called Political Legitimacy and Housing: Singapore’s Stakeholder Society. It looks at the ideological and social-engineering aspect of Singapore’s public housing policy.

I’m fascinated by how newness can emerge from familiar/regimental environments.

I have a thing with hawker centre food …

These are some people I’m learning to see again with my camera.

These were all taken on the same day I was due to go back to Hong Kong.

At the airport … back to Hong Kong…

Is Hong Kong any different?

In the end, it’s all about finding your place, moving up or down…

I should say all of images here are from the same roll of film: Ilford XP2 in an Olympus XA2.

The Leica M6 is now my back up camera (!!!)

Thanks for reading!

Searching for Singapore II

Posted on February 26, 2014March 10, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour

I usually have 2 cameras with me during a photo-walk.

The previous post was with my stealthy Olympus XA2 loaded with Ilford XP2 400 film, while this is a Summicron 50mm Type II Rigid on a Leica M6 loaded with Kodak Portra 400.

I sometimes go all Daido Moriyama with my Olympus XA2 (or I try, at least), while with the Leica, I get that understated Martin Parr social commentary look (or I try, at least).

So that’s the flat visible from Bras Basah Complex, my favourite haunt since when I was a teenager as it’s the place to go to for secondhand books.

I took an Irish colleague there once and he said quite accurately that he could see that Bras Basah Complex was a formative part of my education.

Good old civil defence!

Singapore, along with its many historical landmarks, are works under construction.

That’s just outside the Arts House. I supposed you could call this commissioned graffiti.

“If You Dream Too Long” calls to mind If We Dream Too Long, the title of a novel by the late Goh Poh Seng. I met him once at a literary festival.

The author of yet another great Singaporean novel, Heartland, Daren Shiau, once told he admires the writings of Goh a lot. Heartland is many ways a response to If We Dream Too Long. Read these two books if you want to know Singapore.

Yes, yes, that’s my inner Singaporean literature nerd emerging.

That’s outside Ngee Ann City, a very appropriately named shopping complex because it’s so gigantic.

Yes, the humongous bookstore Kinokuniya Books is in there. It’s a place I go to for inspiration.

The stone lion outside Ngee Ann Complex, representing prosperity and all the good stuff and guarding all that conspicuous wealth inside the shopping mall.

That’s the ice-cream uncle at Orchard Road. I’ll usually buy a durian ice-cream wrapped in bread from him. It costs all of SGD$1. Pretty amazing.

That’s “Urban People”, the art sculpture in front of Ion Orchard, delighting tourists always.

We’re always being framed by brand names at Orchard Road, with fashion models watching over us, reminding us of what we could be if only we’re willing to spend just a little bit more …

Thanks for reading!

Searching for Singapore I

Posted on February 21, 2014March 10, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

I’ve been living and working outside of Singapore for many years now, and every time I return, I’m reminded that I’ll never truly return to the Singapore I know.

It’s like that quote from Heraclitus – you’ll never step into the same river twice. It’s never the same river, and you’re never the same you.

My long-suffering wife knows of my street photography obsession (passion). She understands (bless her!) that I get cranky sometimes and need to go away for a while for an afternoon or two whenever we’re in Singapore.

I can’t help but walk around with my camera(s) with a sense of both recognition and alienation.

That’s the “chwee kueh” (water rice cake, according to Wikipedia) hawker auntie at the market near my place, where I also satisfy my cravings for “chai tow kway” (fried carrot cake) and “char kway teow” (unhealthy rice noodles with black sauce, pork fat, pork lard and cockles).

I have a mental checklist of food to tick off every time I’m in Singapore, such as satay, mee siam, mee rebus, hor fun…

That’s the uncle who for some reason, prefers to sleep at the void deck on most afternoons.

The above are homely scenes for me, while some of the scenes below remind me how commodified Singapore has become.

That’s a tourist, who, for some reason decides to lie down and take a nap near the Merlion Park.

That’s another tourist … every time I am here I am reminded of how Singapore is a place for tourists… I wonder how many Singaporeans actually come here to take photographs …

That’s at Waterloo Street, where you could find a street bazaar.

And of course, that was the Chinese New Year period. Huat ah!

And lion dance performances can really be mesmerizing…

This is Ion Orchard, the shopping mall at Orchard Road.

And there’s something about the architecture that puts together celebrity culture with consumer culture.

We’re all encouraged to shop like celebrities.

Sometimes we “relac one corner” (relax) and claim a little space for ourselves.

And maybe we’ll find something meaningful after all …

This is “Searching for Singapore I”. Part Two, in full colour, will arrive in due time.

Thanks for reading!

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