Yesterday I went on a short tour of Linkou 林口 inspired by the opening of the Taoyuan Airport MRT and the proliferation of YouBike stations to the exurbs of Taipei 台北. After spending some time under the sun I stopped to pick up some water at one of Taiwan’s ubiquitous convenience stores and noticed a weathered padmount transformer out front, pictured here.

Salvaged steel cables and the rhythm of infinite life.

The elevators leading up to the Taipei 101 observatory are the world’s fastest, propelling passengers at more than 60 km/h from the 5th to the 89th floor. The precision-engineered steel cables used to hoist those high-speed lifts are subject to incredible strain and, as a result, are regularly decommissioned. Rather than sell them for scrap, these discarded cables were given to Taiwanese artist Kang Muxiang 康木祥, who began shaping them into a series of provocative and unconventional sculptures.

The first of these works of public art is Infinite Life, “a steel embryo reborn from the towering structure from which it came”, to quote the official Taipei 101 web site. The artist notes that the cables “carried 6.6 million visitors during their six years of operation, so there seemed to be millions of lives wound up in them…”…

Back to the roots.

Sunday afternoon in the mountains of Shilin District 士林區, not far from Yangmingshan, about 200 people gathered for The Forester’s Party 牧神的遊戲 at Siu Siu 少少原始感覺研究室, a lab of primitive senses built on a steep south-facing slope. The aesthetics of the space: slate grey walls, wooden planks underfoot on the dance floor, a round black mesh canopy overhead screening the forest without impeding the flow of fresh mountain air. Clean, modern, minimal, but also rustic—an exceedingly comfortable combination of form and function. The finest in dub techno wafting out of the speakers, one particular song selected by Al Burro capturing the mood of the afternoon with perfect ease, Nthng’s 1996.…

I am just about to zip off to Chiang Mai for the second time and I realized—I still haven’t shared any photos from the first time I went! The reason for this is simple: I was sick every day I was there in early 2012. I made the mistake of visiting during burning season and could hardly breathe the entire time I was there. I didn’t even know what was going on at the time, a consequence of my inexperience with extreme air pollution and the lack of a cell phone (on which I would have certainly read about it in the news as I did after returning to Bangkok) a few days later. “National Haze Crisis Declared”, the headlines read.

This gallery contains more shots from in and around Bangkok, this time with a focus on patterns, texture, grit, grime, decay, terror, and the sublime beauty that haunts the streets of this chaotic metropolis.

This gallery features patterns and textures observed on my short sojourn in Hong Kong 香港 in January 2012.