Category Archives: Gallery

Neighbourhood Explorer: Geylang Sipaku Geylang!

CONCEPT

Moving towards the final of the zine project, I was using the different colours hidden deep behind the concrete front of Geylang as my main concept. The concept behind the zine was that how these small coloured areas are reminiscence of what left of the vibrant culture of Geylang that we knew.  I got more inspired when I saw more images like these.


CONTENT

I decided to add in poetry to accompany my photos as I felt that it would suit my zine better than just writing texts inside. I decided to base on the familiar song “Geylang Sipaku Geylang” and have my take on it. To me the song was somewhat like an invite to go back to Geylang together in a very lively and homely kind of way. So my poetry included a bit of Malay.


CURATING PHOTOS

My past photos only showed architecture so I figured if I added a character inside, it would add more narrative to the zine. So with the help of a friend, I asked her to help make my photos more curated and almost as if she was discovering through these coloured places. I decided that I would only show different parts of her body so the main focus would be only the colour and architecture. I also edited the photos to bring out the colours more in photoshop and to get rid of the unnecessary elements in the photos. 

I also decided that it would be fund to curate the colours of Geylang into a Pantone kind of way. I found inspiration from this local photographer, Jonathan Tan. So what he did was to classify the different places in Singapore into their iconic colours. So here is my attempt on my own!

Attached is my zine! Geylang Pantone

One thing I have learnt from this project is to learn how to really curate photos and due to the restriction of the zine, how to best fit the content into minimal number of pages. I am looking forward to inputing more on what I have learnt about layout, typography and images and how to benefit from them into my future major!

Thats all!

Neighbourhood Explorer Round 2: Deep in Geylang

Hello! So I took a second round around Geylang to observe more closely if there was anything that I missed out from the first round. As for the first round, I only noticed the shopping malls, Malay cuisines at the marketplace and other normal stuff. So this round I made sure to stop at everything. In the end there were three elements that caught my eye, the architecture, doors and windows and the signages. These elements seem to breathe in more life and vibrancy the deeper I went into Geylang. On the surface, was a cold and commercialised place, loosing what we imagined Geylang to be.

Architecture

As you can see, infront there is a lot of construction going on and also the shopping malls placed all infant were grey in colour. It felt very foreign and cold and not what I expected of Geylang. However the deeper I went into, I discovered more character as I looked around and up. I made me feel as sense of warmth and life.

Doors and Windows

The deeper one goes into Geylang, you can see how colourful and unique each shophouse or homes are from their doors and windows. It makes me feel like each shophouse is expressing their own character from the way their doors and windows are painted or decorated making it different from one another, no two doors or windows are ever similar.

Signages

As you can see, in the front there were a lot of construction signs and with different fonts. The fonts were sans serif and very stiff and stagnant, whereas as you walk in deeper the signs became more decorative as they are hidden. If you don’t look up and around you probably won’t notice any of them. It took my second trip here to start noticing all this.

Conclusion to my findings: Geylang is cold and commercialised construction upfront, but behind it it full of colour and character!

My idea for the zine would be uncovering the layers of Geylang! I can do so in many ways, following by colour, or even just the 8 pages being the difference doors and each expressing different characters.

Attached is my presentation slide. Thank you for taking a look!

Neighbourhood Explorer

Thats all!