Old Caoling Tunnel 舊草嶺隧道 was built in the 1920s to connect northern Taiwan with the eastern coast by rail. A new tunnel was built in the 1980s and the old tunnel was closed until 2008 when it reopened as a tourist-friendly bikeway. The main point of entry is Fúlóng 福隆, a beach town in New Taipei City about an hour outside of Taipei by train. Riding through the old tunnel makes for a great day trip from Taipei—as long as you don’t go on a weekend.
I was out cycling through Bitan in Xindian one night when I noticed a big building with blown-out windows looming over Yongye Road (永業路). The skeletal outline of a collapsed rooftop against the umbral sky confirmed my suspicions: this building was abandoned. It was too dark to take a closer look that particular night but I vowed to return.
In March of 2014 I went to see the Xú Bīng (徐冰) retrospective at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (台北市立美術館), easily my favourite gallery space in Taiwan. Xu Bing is a Chinese artist working mainly with representations of language, particularly in the context of interactions between East and West. I first discovered him through an article about character amnesia that discussed A Book From The Sky (天書), a work that continues to capture my imagination.
I should warn you: I’m not an art critic and these photos were shot on a cruddy smartphone. If you’d like to peruse something much more informed and professional about this exhibition I recommend perusing the curator’s statement, English language reviews here, here, and here, or this virtual tour. What follows are a few fleeting impressions of my own from a few hours in Xu Bing’s world.
I discovered Kampung Numbak using Wikimapia, a mash up of Google Maps and Wikipedia, while staying at 1Borneo, a megamall on the outskirts of Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah. After finding it online I decided to pay Numbak a visit. There was something very strange about the juxtaposition of Borneo’s biggest mall and this impoverished village of 5,000 a stone’s throw away.
At the beginning of February I spent several days near Tuaran, a town outside of Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah, Malaysia. Here are a few photos from my adventures there…
Here is the final gallery featuring photos from Tanjung Simpang Mengayau, the northernmost tip of Borneo, in Kudat. All of these shots were captured on Pantai Avoi with the exception of the last photo which was shot on the road heading back to Pantai Kalampunian.
This is the second of three galleries featuring photographs captured near Tanjung Simpang Mengayau, the northernmost tip of Borneo, in the state of Sabah, Malaysia. All of these were shot on Pantai Kalampunian, the beach on the western side of the tip along the South China Sea.
The first of three galleries showing off the natural beauty of Tanjung Simpang Mengayau in Kudat, the northernmost tip of Borneo, in the state of Sabah, Malaysia.
These photos were shot while touring an old Chinese cemetery in Kampung Bakut, a village just outside of Tuaran in the Malaysian state of Sabah. Many Hakka Chinese migrated to this area in the late 19th century, hence the need for a place formally known in Malay as Tanah Perkuburan Orang Cina Tuaran (Chinese: 斗亞蘭華人福壽山). It is a forlorn, neglected place: a hilltop encrusted with elaborate tombs in an elegant state of disrepair. Cemeteries are typically avoided by the local people, a consequence of the widely-held belief that anything to do with death will bring bad luck. Even so, these burial grounds are littered with rubbish and empty glue canisters—an indication that the cemetery entertains at least a few visitors now and then.
Vancouver recently lay under cover of fog for days. This prompted me to grab my camera to find out what could be captured of such mysterious atmospheric conditions. I ventured out into Stanley Park with a tripod one night only to discover that there really isn’t any light to work with. I couldn’t discern the skyline through the thick mire. In fact, I could hardly even see a few meters in front of me. I called that mission off and headed out the next day over Burrard Bridge, around False Creek, and back to the West End by way of Gastown. This time I did not bring a tripod—hence the grainy quality of some of these later photos, all of which were shot by hand with a fixed 35mm lens.