500 postcards COPYRIGHTprojektraum berlin
27.2.2016 - 1.5.2016
The 500 postcards exhibition is an on-going project which is half deliberate and half fortuitous. The deliberate acts are in the photographs I took and the postcards I wrote, the incidental is the combination of the two into one exhibition.
In the spring of 2012 I was invited to show some work in Berlin as part of an exhibition on identity. I decided to send a series of postcards from Singapore, each with a single observation on it. A stamp set was used to print my reflections on my host country. From May 1, 2012 to September 15, 2013 I posted a card every day. I was aware that it is not possible to tell a full story in just one sentence. So I had to be deliberate with my choices, mostly fragments and thoughts which came to me while I was adjusting to life in Singapore. I make no claim to their objectivity or completeness.
My photographs date back to the time I was living in Shanghai in 2007. My curiosity was raised as to the architectural influences on the buildings I was surrounded with. Some buildings seem to be completely clandestine as to their purpose; others showed an unusual mix of architectural styles. At first I took pictures of these buildings for their –from a Western point of view- visual oddities, but soon I became fascinated with other unique aspects of Shanghai architecture. For a while I just captured these impressions in my photographs. Then quite suddenly they revealed their beauty to me. I started to investigate the story behind the building and learned about characteristics of modern Chinese architecture. When I came to Singapore I continued my quest to discover a culture in a building.
The postcards and the architectural photographs are therefore not actually part of one project. They are more or less the results of my left and right brain’s separate attempt to understand the world.
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