All posts tagged: photography

OOTD: A Flash of Foresight

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I have never been fond of orange and yellow tones. My wardrobe is an overwhelmingly cool – neutrals palette, from the black-white-greys to the blue-purples. A few years ago (in the era of the high-waisted skirt but before the crop top came back in), I decided I wanted to be experimental and bought a longer skirt that cut at my calves in a shade of orange I found bearable. It was a failed buy at the time. I couldn’t figure out how to match it to anything in my wardrobe, nor did I enjoy the way it sat on my body and the silhouette it created. I couldn’t really see it at the time and so I decided to throw it at the back of my wardrobe and forget about it. It survived multiple rounds of spring cleaning, I guess I felt that I had to wear it at least once before I donated it out, or that maybe someday I would grow into liking this length and this shape of a skirt. However many …

Dragonfly 蜻蜓

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I have been restless. Over the course of almost two years now, I’ve been stuck on the same piece of land. I have been to multiple shorelines, but the other side has never been the places I am looking for. My land-locked feet are waiting. Waiting for that rolling wave of humidity that will meet me again and again. Waiting for a particular kind of sky and a particular kind of mountain. Waiting for a familiar type of rattle and a certain kind of human density. Some days I think I could give up everything here just to embrace the sound of the cities I love and have not seen for so long. Some days Toronto has no hold over me. I often feel like the other language of me is straining against my skin, 偶爾它強烈的思念讓我旋轉，使我的世界繼續旋轉。They depart in place of me. These words. 這是一封情書吧。也是一種風箏。 I miss the cities grown into my bone. 這翻譯不了的思念我只能用字來握住。 I have been thinking of the slippers I wear all summer at home, with their sunken grooves where my heel hits heavy …

OOTD: Same Same but Different

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I’ve always been a default T-shirt and jeans type of person. Most of my childhood was spent in denim of all kinds, and T-shirts of many colours and cuts. Style-wise, it was never a stand-out type of combination, but it was reliable, comfortable, and always within the realm of acceptable trends. I’ve diversified immensely from my 16-year-old wardrobe, experimenting and growing into different kinds of relationships with my changing fashion. Perhaps a part of it was beginning to understand that I had some control over the way I walked in this world through the way I put myself together. I wanted to learn about this control, develop it, nurture it, and use it. Sometimes we want to change ourselves to become more of something, to be more like the person we dream ourselves to be, to be the person we think will make us happy. Sometimes it takes many styles, sets of outfits and changes to become the person that slips into a pair of jeans with ease. That person was always the person you were; …

Record: Bluffs

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Thinking back to slightly warmer weekends and my favourite Fall weather. Procrastinating from writing my final papers means I go through a ton of content I meant to put up but never did. This set is from some time in October. I’ve been in Toronto for 6 and a half years now and never found time to make it to the bluffs, so my friends took me one weekend and it was stunning. Who knew Toronto’s lake shoreline would be so pretty? Something about ice cream, sunshine and benches… The shoreline is my favourite part of the world. I’m not really a deep sea person, nor am I an intense hiker, but I love the part of the earth where one unknown deep merges together with another unknown. Maybe it’s the way they overlap onto each other, or the way they greet and bid farewell to each well faithfully. The shoreline faces both ways, it is both things, it is beginning and also ending. I like the way the shoreline tells you that what you …

Record: On How Absence Is

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I often think about why certain landscapes speak to me, follow my flows of feeling, thought and body to suss out a specific intersection of points that triggered such a reaction. These exist in my memory as affective moments, strong enough to move me to unwrap Estella from her pouch and look for a means of transcription, representation, and reconstruction. This set of instax snaps is also from my Taiwan 2014 trip, and these 4 images are very close to my heart. There is a strange sense of doubling in every photo, the presence of a something not quite there … which is to say, the photograph is the absence of  bodily experience within the landscape itself. How interesting that this visceral connect within and between my self and the environment is captured best when I have disappeared from the image altogether. Fog lowering like a cold, heavy curtain into the bamboo on top of 阿里山, in a mountain village. I have always loved rain, but this time the rain couldn’t fall on me; I was …