36

Japanese | Chinese

Whenever we get weary and fatigued like a stretched out rubber band on the verge of snapping, an absolute tranquility would always so unexpectedly befall us. Everything returns to calmness in a split second; our ears suddenly acquire a new sensitivity that all the previously unheard sounds become audible. “Looking out from the window, the forest afar is reflecting lights and shadows at a rhythm set by the wind. My gaze was instantly attracted.” Every time as the light rays start fading away, such picture would leave Tang Holun, a photographer, captivated and dazed. All of a sudden, a detachment is formed to break away from mundaneness, to depart from where we used to imagine as inescapable. As time passes, such experience slowly swells in the heart and becomes intimately precious moments.

Losing the power to contain himself, Tang picked up his camera and ran into the forest searching for the source of light. The vital tree branches kept reaching out robustly with exuberance. Involuntarily, he stared at the tips of the branches like a runner focusing on the track. “When you are fully concentrating on one thing, the world would feel distant as if not existing at all.” Without too much thought, shutters were pressed. Destiny, combined with his shooting habits, gave shape to a roll of film that lives up to Tang’s idea of perfection. 36, corresponding to the number of exposures in a film, is an uncut series of all images captured from the first exposure to the last, earnestly presented in a book by its original chronological order.

“Many of the photographs in the book appear to be almost identical to each other. In fact, as no immediate preview is available for analog film photography, I only applied slight adjustment before taking another shot. Such repeated process led by ambiguity gave every new shot a revolutionary quality. To put it in another way, every shot has left behind some sort of residues that would eventually ripple onto the next one, to reinforce the affirmation.” From the perspective of the outcome, landscapes possess a fluid nature that is free of any definite form. This echoes the ever-changing state of wavering light rays in the forest, an arbitrary phenomenon of nature, which cannot be emulated, just the same as the different faces of humanity.

Featuring the accordion-folding structure as the bookbinding style to imitate the form of a long film roll, 36 deliberately removes the intrusive front and back covers to eliminate the boundary set by the first and last page. The extremely minimal design has allowed minimum interference with the reading experience, so that the images can be an eternal loop without a beginning or an end. Taking a departure from the typical hardcovers that are often seen among accordion-folded books, the exposed pages have released the book from a conventional structure. The casual and open format would fall into unique forms defined by the readers’ hands, creating all kinds of spontaneous possibilities to the reading experience.

Book Size: 122 x 210mm  Book Size(fully open): 5930 x 210mm  50 pages, Accordion Binding by hand Bilingual in English & Chinese 2018 Oct, 1st Edition, 200 copies Printed in Hong Kong   

Photographer: Tang Ho Lun  Designer: Furze Chan