bamboo – Hong Kong Lucida

Yuen Long Wet Market

Posted on November 27, 2014November 24, 2014 by eddietay in Colour

We were at a wet market in Yuen Long.

I walked past this shed and felt I really had to take a shot.

If you’re in construction, you have to be a bit of a Spiderman.

They’re very agile.

Chicken rice stall.

We walked through a wet market.

Straw hats for sale.

Very fried and oily calamari (or were they oysters)?

I thought the wall was rather beautiful.

I was having a William Eggleston moment here.

The second floor of a village house.

Dried seafood.

More dried seafood.

Some more dried seafood.

Dried seafood, anyone?

Last chance to buy dried seafood!

Scaffoldings offer lots of compositional possibilities.

I walked around to obtain different angles.

I have so many others but I’ll stop here.

The underside of awnings too, can be beautiful.

Check out the lines, colours and shadows.

Sometimes the most common of things can offer up beauty.

The blue and yellow above go very well together.

The arm offers a quirky variation to the scene.

Bamboo scaffolding.

Some more scaffolding.

Parking lot signage.

Thanks for reading!

All photographs here were taken with the now classic Canon G11.

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!

Scaffolding

Posted on March 28, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

We have been creating a scaffolding here, of which the centre is humankind. Or if this is too grandiose, perhaps we could say that the centre here is a self, a contingency of photography, language, and thought. We think we are building something here but what finally emerges is a self with whom we quarrel.

Bamboo Noodles

Posted on March 19, 2013February 21, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

Already there is a pattern to these photographs – the commonplace activities of walking and driving, roads and pavements, people on display – a city is united in pedestrian activities. I happened to be at Cheung Sha Wan on an errand to pick up bamboo noodles for my wife and I chanced upon this. I too am a pedestrian, albeit with a camera. What is that private epiphany here? In Camera Lucida, Barthes focused on memory, family, loss and grief. I am interested in production, action, and mobility of both thought and writing.

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