Planning & Conceptualising 

Upon reading the brief requirements of having something “distinctively local”, I remembered the time that I had to dissect what it really meant to be local. Was it the HDBs, mama shops, or local food that we identified with, or the commodified “culture” & “society” that we were led to believe, such as the gentrified tourism spots such as the Marina Bay area, stories about the Merlion, or the kebayas hat the Singapore Airlines stewardesses wore in front of our international guests?

For this work, I wanted to tell a story about consumption and Singapore’s tourism industry’s effect on our culture and society. I had ideas from the “bleaching of the Singapore River”, to showcase that whitewashing of Singapore’s history, to replacing the Merlion with an actual cat to have a playful take on the project.

Inspired by my morbid sense of humour, I decided to superimpose iconic Singaporean things as something being literally consumed.

The Process & Information Gathering 

I took a mid shot of me having my dinner to use as a basis of the picture. I wanted to do this to leave a little bit of mystery of the person who is consuming the soup, as it would be up to the viewer’s interpretation on whether the person is a local, tourist, or expatriate.

For the contents of my red soup, I went around Singapore’s hottest tourism spot, the Marina Bay Sands Area, take a picture of Singapore’s iconic buildings. I chose this sport in particular because none of the buildings are authentic to Singapore, and have been created as part of a showcase to other countries about Singapore’s wealth. Then I used a close up of an eye for the background, to symbolise an omnipresence being watching, and making sure that you are being fed only the “good things”.

Knowing that i might be lacking in certain aspects in this project, I decided to make up for it using my knowledge on colour blocking. As such, this explains why the colours in this picture are highly saturated, so that the colours would stand out and compliment each other. Colours such as purple and gold are used to signify richness, and the red tinted soup in the bowl is to signify “Singapore”.

Challenges

As a person who is mostly in front of the camera instead of being behind it, I have limited skills in taking photos. However, these are some of my attempts at taking different pictures:

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do I like my work?

Can’t say that i’m particularly confident in this work, because of my skills, but this was a testament of my experimentation with a medium i’m unfamiliar with. Actually, I also should have listened to my gut feeling to crop the picture, to an image of me and only the bowl (without the background) because iI too felt that including the background would have taken the focus away from the main subject. But in all, I would say that I am contempt with this piece.