The waves lap against the shore. The temperature drops as the sun goes down. The ocean splashes away the last bit of warmth in the body.
The girl is playing. The sound of the waves runs into your ears, and slowly flows into your eyes. The girl feels cold and is ready to leave.
“I know her well. That uncooperative nature of her.” Do you feel like you are taking pictures of a child? “Exactly. This also means that it’s not the body that attracts me. It’s that sense of wildness.” The primitive nature of humans? “Most of the people who are convinced to be my shooting subject would say, ‘Oh. Take a nice shoot.’ But she never thinks like that. It’s primitive. Not many people are like that. Primitive is good.”
“It was 6 o’clock. We started shooting from 4 and ended by 6 o’clock that day.” I had a chat with Tang Ho Lun on his new book Blue Carpet. Unlike previous times, we started chatting before going over the book. “It is a transient period of time, especially in winter.” The blue sky fades into the deepest dark in just a blink of an eye.
What was the sea like that day? “The sky was very clear and blue. I think it was the sky that made the sea beautiful; it was a reflection. Summer is about to pass, we are slowly moving into coldness.”
The book is decorated with some seemingly random brushstrokes and coloring by Ho Lun. “They are like glue that put together my text and Tsang Waiyi’s calligraphy. I asked Tsang Waiyi (a calligrapher in Hong Kong) to calligraph for my book. I like how her brushstrokes flow on paper. Even though I am the one who actually wrote all the text, I feel like it’s her calligraphy that put the words into the right place.” As if turning the doorknob would unleash all the thoughts that are trapped inside. “It is the combination of these two that inspired me to paint.”
There are fragments in muddy yellow that look like scratches left by rubbing a piece of stone on the paper, and that the stone eventually turns into scattering sand. What’s “more realistic than our eyes, ears, mouth and nose” is the natural cycle of life. It allows you to see the wonder of life. Peeking from a broken hole, you could see shining stars brighten up the sky. When dots and strokes dance on the paper, it is when humans are closest to nature.
“During that time of the day, everything turns blue. It’s like the entire world is covered in a blue carpet.”
“I want people to feel that ‘the moment is approaching.’ It’s like the different shades of blue on a litmus paper, from light blue to darkness.”
Time passes, just like how a piano piece begins with a prologue and slowly progresses to an end. As the sun goes down, only a piece of blue is left behind. If you lie down and stare up at the cloudless sky, you could feel that the sense of distance slowly disappears into the endless sky. The wind blows and blurs the view of that blue carpet in your eyes.
