Literary critic Raymond Williams, in his musings of 19th century London in The Country and the City (1973), wrote that the great city is a paradox, that despite the absence of common feeling and a sense of a sharper perceptual confusion, there is also the promise of an evolving consciousness of a practical underlying connection and sympathy among the city’s inhabitants.
Perhaps, it is this kind of paradox as well that propelled writers and artists all over, including seasoned Singaporean photographer and visual artist Chan Wai Teik to explore in their works this ambivalence, this sense of being in a place and an outsider at the same time, the fascination with death, rituals and everyday things that seem to be anachronistic yet at the same time suffused with the vitality of the present or the future.
Chan Wai Teik is a renowned photographer who has worked with Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Saatchi & Saatchi and Elite Model Look. He published his first collection of works, Hypertrophy, in 2006 which was highly received and recently, he was the guest photographer in the reality show, Asia’s Next Top Model.
His “Offerings” series, which won the bronze award at the One Eyeland Photography Awards 2015, features Chan’s contemplation with death and this seeming need to venerate the dead.
Growing up in the ’70s, he was already fascinated with the Taoist practice of offerings during the Hungry Ghost Festival. Despite the seemingly secular life, Chan noticed that there are such moments and places in Singapore where practices and beliefs still exist, time becomes fluid, tradition melds with modernity.
In most of Chan’s works we could see a woman in gold-foiled bamboo paper (the paper often used in Hungry Ghost rituals). The enigmatic woman in his works is often shrouded and yet glittering in darkness and the art deco backdrop is actually inspired by Fritz Lang 1927 film, Metropolis.
The works intimate definitely this evanescent character of metropolis, its bewildering aura, charm, and vitality. In an interview, Chan said, that he was curious to know how a ritual persists, and he wants to capture such moment through his lens informed by pop culture, fashion, science and technology.
