Something Better (more)

Taken at the 2011 MAAF...

New (2011-) Photo project - SOMETHING BETTER

11-12-30-2010

back in the day, i loved taking photos inside bldgs. there's something about spatial relation - goes back to growing up in hk i'm sure. sometimes, the decor or art or whatever is just interesting. after 9/11, no more photos in the lobby... at least no standing in the middle with a camera gathering attention. lol. anyway, the atrium here (which isn't a lobby i don't think :P) had some really cool mannequin tree decorations for x'mas. so for a month, i tried to capture them with the blackberry while moving as a part of the a.m. commuting masses...

365 days

the vid is compressed to 5% (to fit the 100mb max here) - hence the pixelation. it is 6 mins long. the set of (11) still photographs was taken at a restaurant in chinatown. it's repeated 365 times. while you're 'stuck' watching the Sisyphean repetition, with the option to pause/fast forward, 365 is the number of days/year most businesses are opened in chinatown here (366 for leap years). 6:00a.m. to 8:00p.m. (or 12noon to 2a.m. depending on biz/shift) 7 day/wk with 1 day off/month schedules are not unusual. my grandmother used to talk about having to work so much that dying would be the only way to have free time; but one might be too busy to die...

for better quality: http://www.vimeo.com/20314136

20 nights

for a month, i left the office the same time with this woman (she worked in a different building i think - i'd only see her at the corner of wacker/la salle - the pale blue jacket caught my eye at first). even though we were both heading towards the subway station later in the evening, we never once made eye contact/acknowledge each other's existence. that's kind of interesting from a social experiment pov, i think.

3 mins

set of 6 still photographs (at 5 fps) repeated to form this 3 mins vid. 3 mins of impatience, 3 mins of one's life waiting for the train (with luggage) to get somewhere, and repeated how many times? and is the 'where' where we really want to get?

a.m. tuesday

just tuesday a.m. going to work. the subway was relatively empty as it was before new year so most people were still on holiday. it was interesting to see people talking, since usually most people are doing something with their cell phone/mp3 even if they are with people they know (sometimes guilty here).

don't think i can cope outside urban areas, but sometimes city-living makes me think Albee's Zoo Story...

for better quality: http://vimeo.com/atyl/tuesday-morning

captive

distance to real

saturday (on Blue)

signs

too

commute

(2009-12-15; 2010-03-25)

framed

(2010-11-12)

challenge

(2009-02-17)

the middle frame is where she was certain i was taking pics...
(btw, all of the 'sequential' pics are posted in order of capture, from left to right and top to bottom)

oblivion

(2010-04-19)

anti-gaze (shooting blind)

(2011-02-14)

literally, i had my eyes closed when i took these pics. partly because i think the gaze is what usually give me away when i shoot pics of strangers. also i've this underlying fear of blindness, after my mom was diagnosed with non-age-related macular degeneration (which according to wiki - however accurate that is - means my lifetime risk of developing same is 50% higher than norm), and especially discovering that i had an older brother who was blind at birth. i think this is partly why i'm compelled to produce, to amass a body of work.

cell phone

(2011-01-28)

eye contact

(2009-11-18)

we were standing against opposite subway doors, just to give context of subject/object distance for some of these sequences

Gaze

(2009-11-05; 2010-11-17; 2011-02-03)

Originally, these photographs were explorations with sequence/time-event lapse. Somewhere along the way, I became interested in the power of "the gaze" (Lacan & Foucault). Soon, performance elements are incorporated into the investigation. Often the interactive element becomes a challenge between me and the subject. Do men and women react differently to a photographer, especially when they are strangers to each other? When the gaze is without permission? Whether the perceived sexual orientation of the subject/object affects the interaction?

A Year in Window

I don't have very many clear memories from childhood, but I do remember walking by a garment shop on Prince Edward Road every day going home from school. It was not a big shop, but there were many mannequins in the windows and usually at least one of them would be in pieces, waiting for its new clothes. I think that's the root of my fascination with mannequins (they're like giant - then bigger than life-size - dolls).

For a year (08/09-08/10), I walked by the Golden Closet (a vintage clothing shop, now defunct) almost everyday for my commute. I took photographs with my phone every time there's a change in the windows. It started as a documentation of time passing, but what I soon found more interesting were the illusions in each tableaux...

for better quality: http://vimeo.com/atyl/a-year-in-window

Dibs!!

This is the 2nd year my mom's been living in the States, and her first blizzard. She's very amused by the time-honored 'dibs' system of reserving shoveled street parking. So we borrowed my landlord's shovel and lawn chair and bucket and for the first time ever, I shoveled out my car this morning... We're calling it performance art.

Time

It's really amazing how easily it slips through one's fingers...

(I've been shooting the sequences this last year, just haven't posted them...yet!)