Archive for the 'Photos' Category

Featured artist: My Little Dead Dick

Published
by
Jason Li
on May 2, 2008
in Art and Photos
. 0 Comments

According to a quote from nerve.com on the artists’ website:

“The ecstatically romantic story of Madi Ju and Patrick Tsai (Pat Pat)
tells you everything you need to know about the inspiration behind
their gleeful photography. Taiwanese-American Pat Pat was raised in
California and schooled in New York. Jolted by the Iraq War, he packed
up and moved to Taipei to seriously pursue photography. Three years
later, he met Madi, who lived in China, on the internet. They
rendezvoused in Hong Kong, fell in love, quit their jobs and struck out
on a pan-Asian adventure together…”

And presenting, the photographing duo known as My Little Dead Dick.

Mylittledeaddick1

Mylittledeaddick2

http://mylittledeaddick.com

Continue reading ‘Featured artist: My Little Dead Dick’

Hong Kong’s most famous graffiti artist and typographer

Published
by
Jason Li
on March 27, 2008
in Art, Dating, Meme and Photos
. 1 Comment

Presenting Hong Kong’s most famous graffiti artist and typographer…

Kowloonking

KowloonKing2

And it’s true — I do see his work around town, when I am home. Unfortunately, he passed away in July.

See the Chinese Wikipedia entry about him for more details.

Photo taken by Frank Chan. Kudos to bad taste but smell good for reminding me about him.

Though to be fair, someone’s also done this in the US (in San Mateo):

Sanmeteo

Found at Paul Saffo’s journal.

remembering pleasures of the past: Chinese black and white photos

Published
by
IFTF
on March 19, 2008
in BBS, History, Photos and Virtual China
. 0 Comments

A recent photo montage on Tianya, called Smiles of the Past 50 Years. You won’t be able to link to it without registering at Tianya, so I’ll post some more below the jump.

Early spring1957, Hubei province, Macheng County, Xujia Village, 549 Production Brigade: soldier Yang Zhiyi shows off on the bar.

Bar_work

Spring 1975, Hubei Province, Macheng County, Zhongyi Commune, Wangjiyi Production Brigade: practicing high jumping.

High_jump

Spring 1976, Jiangsu, Hai’an County, Beiling Commune, Fengda Brigade member. Using the natural elements of the rivers, banks, and ditches in the landscape, the brigade holds rope-climbing and other kinds of activities.

Ropeclimbing

July 1978, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous District, Du’an Yao Autonomous County, Gaoling Commune, 5 Bamboo Production Brigade: foot-race.

Mountain_path_race

January 1960, Heilongjiang Province, Longjiang County, Baishan People’s Commune: In the space of one short month the entire commune got together to build 9 ice rinks where over 4000 people participated in ice sport activities. This is a group heading to the rinks with their home-made ice skates and blades.

Skating

Summer of 1958, Liaoning Province, Beipiao County, Under Elms Village, Longtan Farming Commune, taking a break from work and “leap-horsing” in the fields.

Leapfrogging

on the BBS: fortune tellers on the edges

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on March 10, 2008
in BBS and Photos
. 0 Comments

Netease’s "news" forum has this item today, on a group of rather shabby streetwide fortune tellers: On those who know the fate of others. 

With great difficulty I managed to sneak up on these people and secretly take a few photos.  Could it be that they can see their own fates?

Life_on_the_edges

Selected responses:

Yes, their fates are to remain this way for the rest of their lives!

They’re all fakes!

Maybe they told their own fortunes and found out that this was the best thing for them to do?

Hey, they’re making a living.

Fate can be told, but it all depends on who’s doing the telling.  Really good fortune-tellers don’t sit on the street.

When someone dies his or her relatives can’t stand the feeling of being separated.  Even if one knows it’s fake, still sometimes they do make pretty accurate predictions.  There’s a willingness to spend the money.  Whose fault is it, anyway, that China’s psychology profession is so backwards?

Veteran photographer: 鲍昆 Bao Kun

Published
by
Jason Li
on February 19, 2008
in Blogs and Photos
. 0 Comments

Baokun1

鲍昆 Bao Kun is (according to billsdue) a renowned photographer in China, who joined the Chinese Photography Association in 1983 and also taught at the University of Science & Technology Beijing.

His photoblog has some great work, including a post (full of photos) about New Cities New Citizens:

Baokun2

Baokun3

Visit his photoblog!

Via billsdue.

The cold in China

Published
by
Jason Li
on January 30, 2008
in Photos
. 0 Comments

Some of you may have heard that China is going through a very, very cold spell right now and that the army has been mobilized to help out the citizens.

I found some photos today on awflasher that I’d like to share.

Snow1

Snow2

Snow3

Via awflasher.com.

layers of looking: eerie images of Chinese mental illness

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on January 27, 2008
in BBS and Photos
. 0 Comments

47430bd30104ulqz

I came across a BBS on Sina tonight, images from an exhibition of photos of Chinese inmates in asylums, period unknown, location unknown.  They looked uncannily like someone taking photos through a security camera…but then Jason figured out they were photos of photos hanging on a wall. 

For non-Chinese readers, go to the bottom of the page and click on the image that looks like this, in order to scroll through the 4 pages of photos:

Picture_1

From 传说狼的联盟的BLOG

Hong Kong steps up and pollutes itself

Published
by
Jason Li
on January 13, 2008
in Photos
. 0 Comments

In the past decade, the pollution in Hong Kong has been getting more and more serious, and most of it is attributable to the winds that bring the haze from factories in the Mainland.

But sometimes, it’s our own fault, or, if you prefer, the fault of the big corporations in Hong Kong, as was the case a few days ago:

Hkpollution

The caption accompanying the photo above (taken by my father): "Smoke and steam from the 3 chimneys of the HK Electric power plant [see left side of enlarged photo] at Lamma Island clearly clouded the sky!!"

See original photo here.

Chinese photography: Pan Meiyun’s bubble building

Published
by
Lyn Jeffery
on December 13, 2007
in Photos
. 3 Comments

Olympic_water_bldg

gorgeous, isn’t it?  Dr. Pan Meiyun is a professor and professional photographer who has been taking pictures of the Olympic construction sites over the past two years.  SSPhoto, a website for Chinese scenic photos, has a page of her National Swim Center, aka Bubble Building, photos.

A pseudo-realistic photograph at the frontier of photo sharing

Published
by
Jason Li
on November 18, 2007
in Art, Design and Photos
. 2 Comments

I was clicking through news portal Daqi and noticed this obviously fake yet incredibly evocative photograph:

Pseudo_realism

The author is 麦田精灵 (wheat field fairy), and the picture seems to have been hand-picked from a non-Daqi forum: the 云南信息港 (Yunnan Information Port)’s photo sharing forum. The user profile doesn’t yield much information about the picture’s creator, except that she has contributed to over 20,000 posts on the Yunnan forum and that she can be reached at km@sina.com.

A Daqi editor picked up these photographs off of the Yunnan forum and created a feature out of it on Daqi’s new photo sharing section (大棋图海). In this section you can check out the original source of the picture (a feature which is actually often missing on other sites), comment on the picture (actually links to the original Yunnan forum), and vote on the picture in two ways:

  1. 送鲜花 = give fresh flowers
  2. 拍砖头 = hit [with?] a brick

So far, the votes for this set is 28 flowers to 2 bricks.

How is all this relevant?

  • This is another example of how China’s internet employs many content editors or seekers to discover "hot" content to bring it to main portal sites.
  • The trackbacks (being able to find the original post) is a sign of a maturing internet, in case this, at Daqi.
  • American sites would use a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system, but the Chinese version is more graphical, and has more personality — it’s entertaining, just the way most Chinese people like it when it comes to the internet.