Notebook · Observations · Process
Notes from the field, observations, process, the thinking behind the work. Written from streets, markets, and the spaces between.
The plan is simple and not simple: arrive the first day and just walk. No camera. Let the city happen to you. The Pentax comes out on day two, when your eye has already started adjusting to what's actually there instead of what you expected to find.
What I'm looking for is what I'm always looking for, the third space. The corner where the wet market bleeds into the phone repair stall, where the older woman sits in the plastic chair outside the closed shop, where the tram cuts through Chun Yeung Street and the crowd parts around it like it's always been there and it has.
The Urban Pigment methodology means every city becomes a palette. Hong Kong already has colors: the rust of corrugated iron, the particular grey of aged concrete, the sulfur yellow of incandescent signage at dusk. I want to find out what those colors are called, not the Instagram-friendly names, but the historical ones, the ones that carry the weight of the material.
Before the fellowship plane takes off, the work starts here, three days at Asia Society Texas Center, June 9–11, as part of the second annual Summer Institute for educators. Six hours a day with scholars, community partners, and a guided walk through Houston's Asiatown. The city I've been photographing has an Asian geography I've been circling around. Time to go inside it.
The institute is designed to bring Asian and Asian American histories and lived experiences into classrooms. But for this practice, it's something else: a way of learning to see the city I already know through a different frame. If Urban Pigments is about finding the same atmosphere across Houston and Seoul and Hong Kong, it helps to understand what that connection actually means, what the history is, what the communities carry, why the light looks the way it looks in Asiatown at noon.
The Realgar photograph from Midtown, the Chinese restaurant sign pooling orange light on the sidewalk, is already asking that question. The institute is where the practice starts to answer it.
Field notes, observations, and photographs from the fellowship trip will be added as the work happens.
Visual Research Board