invited guest: Lung Liu - Majico
Mexico was a whim. I bought a ticket days before the flight and made my decision over a microwaved TV dinner and a Mexico tourism commercial. Two of my three weeks were spent photographing - almost strictly confined to the areas outside Mexico City. Again, these portraits are about access and intimacy - they are about respect. These people are strangers I met off the streets and had conversations with, at least as much of a conversation as one can hope to have with a 20 word vocabulary and pantomiming. These photographs were taken as quickly as I can and with no direction from myself in order to capture as real an image as possible. Many of these scenes candidly unfolded in front of me while others I asked for permission when I could. In the end this trip was about meeting these people - wonder full as an exercise in magic surrealism. The photographs are incidental.
I am an emerging artist with an interest in documentary portraiture and landscape photography. In the past two years, I have exhibited in group and solo shows, published in magazines, and have placed in and won international competitions.
Motivation
I was born in Vietnam shortly after the war and grew up in the poverty that followed it. In the late 70’s, my
parents uprooted our family and escaped with others in a small wooden boat. We were the boat people, among the many waves of refugees that fled the shores of Vietnam.
After spending some time in a refugee camp, a Canadian church sponsored our family in 1979. The rest of my childhood was typical of that of an Asian family. I was to study hard and do well in school. I will graduate and go to university, then to medical school as was the natural course of things. Somewhere along the way, I rebelled against my chosen path and although I did obtain a Bachelors in Microbiology, I eventually veered towards a vocation as far from the sciences as I possibly could - namely photography.
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