Shrines

I did some growing up in Hong Kong, when there was still a bit of bush to roam around in on the Island. I’d often come across shrines and bone burial jars. My best mate Mike - a local - possessed a red-coloured shrine in the amah’s area behind the kitchen of his apartment in Villa Monte Rosa and I’d admire it as I watched his cook, Ah Fong, whipping up chow fan for our lunch.

Shrines seem instinctively important, don’t they? Whether one ‘believes’ or not, in my mind they are thresholds between ordinary life and other meaningful presences and states.

When I am most concentrating on them they help me with consciousness and they re-energize my intuition in something more than my current state of being. Without markers such as these, I feel space would seem more abstract than it does.

My treatment of the images in this series indicates the richness of symbolism to be found, though I have no doubt that many of the shrines I’ve seen have been more subjected to pleas for wealth than noble outcomes. And fair enough too!