I spent the week or so prior to the chinese new year in Anchang and the Beichuan area, which was one of the hardest hit and in which there are many quake victims living in temporary housing. I talked a bunch of them and in general just observed their lives there. I will write something more in depth later. I hope to follow their story in the coming months and years.

Technorati Tags: quake, earthquake, victims, pictures, photos, tragedy, life, china, chinese

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I don’t remember where I first heard of Tin Shui Wai, but I believe someone told me that this was the famous “walled city” (圍城） that the movie was named after, so I went there expecting something desperate and ghetto, but didn’t find anything of the sort. The subway ride is nice…the stations are not as flashy and busy as the ones in the major Hong Kong lines; there’s a certain sterility, as if somewhere along the way, somewhere underground you passed a threshold. Of course for me, this is just reflected in how things look and appear, and what effects that has on you–that is, how the urban environment, urban form, urban aesthetics affects your perception of, well, everything: even if you are thinking of something utterly different, the environment is still there, leaving some kind of subtle imprint on your mind, coloring your moods and perceptions. I think that’s why my photos has some strange and obviously distorted color schemes: the attempt to impart the deep truth of the place, or one’s subjective vision of a place, means that you hve to depart from the common notion of verisimilitude, and truth be told once you get used to it, it ain’t no thang.

I wondered what it would be like living here; in one sense it’s no different from the rest of Hong Kong, but in another sense, it is separated by those lush forests and hills, and has a radically different form—we’re talking suburbs here, high-rises cloned and sprouted all over the place, jutting awkwardly into the sky, assured of their functionality but somehow unsure of their existence.

Shopping malls: I played Time Crisis 4 there, blowing a chunk of change that could have been used for better purposes. Others played that horse-racing game where plastic horses race across a track. It’s dated and quaint for that very reason. You would have expected horse-racing to have morphed into some high octane video game with crystal-clear graphics, the whole nine yards. And here was this old contraption, looking like some kind of cheap museum diorama…anyhow I can’t see what the fun of it is. Nearby, old men play video game mahjong.

I wonder how much time I’ve spent wandering through malls. It’s become some kind of ritual, so much so that I can pretty much sleepwalk through it. It’s so utterly familiar and so perfectly banal that you don’t even think twice about it, it’s automatic, a twitch that sometimes lasts an entire afternoon.

tinshuiwan, tianshuiwan, pictures, photos, arcades, games, life, malls, shopping, consumerism, consumers, ricoh, photos, photography

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The rest of that series is here. Some photographs from the Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann are here.

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I recently bought the K-touch A902, which in case the pictures don’t make it obvious, takes its inspiration from some phone designed in Cupertino.

Someone noticed that it had a health menu that had several interesting functions. One was the BMI (body-mass index) and the other was the MENSES calculator. As you can see from the picture you tell it when your last period was and how long between your periods, and the results come up on the calendar. The um, red colored days are the days you bleed. You can also click on the other days to find out if those are good days for getting pregnant. Pill Schmill, condom, schlongdom, I’m all about the timing now.

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I thought this picture was somewhat amusing…don’t know if there was any PS in this but then again, having a huge belly that you can puff out more isn’t exactly a rarity among middle-aged men.

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Hu Yang (胡杨) is the Shanghai based documentary photographer that takes shots of people living in Shanghai, in their native environments–their homes. He did a series that got a lot of publicity in the last year or so, it was called 《上海人家》 and showed Shanghainese people (or at least people who live here) from all walks of life in their homes, which was quite interesting not only sociologically but because many of the rooms had a personality of their own and showed us personal idiosyncracies that were far more interesting than any broader, social truth that might have (but ultimately was not) gleaned from the picutres. Well, I was leafing thorugh the pages of Shanghai Photography Magazine and saw that he’d done some new pictures, portraits of young people born anytime between 1970 and 1989. The photographs are nothing to write home about, but I guess there is still that minimal portrait of a generation value to it. In the actual exhibit and article in the magazine you read what each subject answered to a questionnaire given to them by the photographer, stuff on what their personal interests and hobbies were, etc. Anodyne but interesting, I suppose.

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