"Quilt" Opens



Alvin took this lovely photograph while I was shooting from the other angle. It is an outtake, or perhaps more appropriately a behind-the-scenes photograph.

If not for R from Casual Poet, I would have never thought of doing a personal 'exhibit'. And even now as it opens I am shy just mentioning the term 'exhibit'.

It is a Quilt for me in more than one way; obvious in how I 'patched' these different lives and boys together. But even more so because while conceiving this, I was aware of the works by different artists that have taken photographs of such sleepy boys. So in a way, this is weaved thinly by the creative threads and influences of these brilliant artists whom I will always hold in high regards and feel inferior to. Ash has also reminded me of how the quilt and the fabric is almost now a metaphor for AIDS prevention and 'nation building'. Indeed, there is that social dimension to this series - the infallibility and invincibility of youth and yet how fragile it is for us to remember this only in a frame that is taken in less than a second.



R has set it up such that the photographs are pegged onto a string that is nailed onto the wall and I like the imagery of how these pictures (being part of a bigger one) are hung out to dry like laundry.

Come to Casual Poet because it is a cozy cafe tucked nicely above the bak kwa stalls and antique shops in Chinatown. I could spend an entire afternoon with their books and imported queer and quaint magazines I cannot get elsewhere.