HDB – Hong Kong Lucida

Singapore Speaks Monochrome

Posted on September 12, 2014September 12, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

Singapore is a work in progress, and the physical landscape never fails to remind you of this.

There could be cranes in the sky in built-up areas, and there could be views like the one below.

Occasionally, it gets a bit postmodern, like this:

The inside wants to be outside.

Our desires/appetites/wants/needs are very well structured and catered to.

Everything is for sale.

Cities are places where appetites are met.

Appetites transcend national boundaries …

Pig organ soup, anyone? It’s actually quite yummy.

Waiting.

Doing.

Working.

Cooking.

Buildings are structures of desires.

There’s ambition in the architecture.

These are homely desires.

There’s an architecture of modernity.

An architecture of nationhood.

And space in which we simply do nothing at all.

Thanks for reading!

Open-edition prints are available at my Saatchi Art page.

Singapore Speaks Colour

Posted on September 9, 2014September 10, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Colour

Various scenes in Singapore – some iconic, others a little whimsical.

Singapore the Garden City.

Executives waiting for a bus. This was taken while I was in a bus.

For the love of country.

Country loving fashion.

Looking up.

He posed for me.

The above and below few images are of workers who are maintaining a playground.

They saw what I was doing, smiled, and gamely went on with their work.

They were very thorough.

They were tightening all the screws.

And checking to see if everything is in order.

That’s a chicken rice stall – the kind of food I go for whenever I am in Singapore.

This is part of the everyday Singaporean culture often take for granted.

A sack of something on the pavement.

It makes for a wonderful art installation idea.

Barrier – though I wonder what the triangular cut-outs are for.

The durian.

Lamp shade.

That’s a partial rendering of the Marina Bay Sands, a tourist destination.

It reminds me of a Star Trek phaser.

Rooftop facade of the Esplanade – also known as the durian.

Swissotel the Stamford, designed by I.M. Pei.

A construction worker taking a break at a public housing void deck.

For collectors: open-edition prints are available here.

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!

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!

My Singapore

Posted on August 23, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in About Singapore, Monochrome

I was in Singapore recently and of course, I brought along my Leica M6 fixed with a 50mm Summicron.

I was paranoid at first about the film going through airport x-rays. But I could see no fogging to my beloved Ilford XP2 films on a previous trip despite them having gone through 4 x-ray cabin baggage scanners at the airport at HK airport, then at Dubai where I transited, and back again.

I took a walk around my neighbourhood and walked past him, circled around, and took this:

This was at the National Library. I simply love this particular angle of the architecture:

This was in Hans, the café at the library. I like the rectangular grid:

And yes, the kacang puteh man:

You might say there’s a statement here waiting to be made about the life of a kacang puteh seller, as our attention is drawn to the newspaper headline the seller has put up.

And then I had my Singapore-style chicken rice here. They do it very differently in Hong Kong…

The photograph below sums up my ambivalent attitude towards my country of birth, in which I’ve spent 3/4 of my life before moving to Hong Kong. About 80-85% of the people live in public housing, and the facades of these HDB flats are often used as symbols of conformity, depicting the cookie-cutter and pigeonholed lifestyle and aspirations of middle-class Singaporeans. I have in mind those haunting images at the beginning of Eric Khoo’s 12 Storeys.

I think of the photograph below as saying something opposite.

I like the tree here because it symbolizes something else, that perhaps there is life, rejuvenation and fresh insights that might arise. I sense a poem coming …

Finally, since some of my friends have been asking about my street photography and the point of it all, here’s an essay by Nick Turpin that says it.

I especially like this quote from Nick’s essay:

“As a Street Photographer you are different, you are not like the others, you are an oddity both in society and in photography. In society you are odd because you are just standing their [sic] looking whilst everyone rushes past to their next shopping experience or intake of salty, sugary, fatty food. In photography you are odd because your motivation is not financial and you don’t go to photo trade shows unless it’s to people watch. You are really not part of either world, it can be lonely not talking about equipment and bags and not oiling the wheels of retail….if it weren’t for online street photography forums you could feel isolated like some lonely eccentric.”

Sometimes I stop and look around and wonder where everyone is rushing off to…

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