My car is a special part of this time capsule because to me it was a mark in the symbolism of American freedom. When I found my '99 E320 for $4000 on Facebook marketplace, it fulfilled a part of me that felt like had been yearning since the day I dreamed of living in the United States. It is my first car and honestly it is beautiful enough to be one that someone would call their last. Growing up without a father had left certain gaps in learning "how to be a man" and parts of those gaps were healed through self learning how to change my tire, rolling under to change my oil, conditioning the leather seats and checking blown fuses etc. The keys of the car is what I will store in the physical "time capsule"
My Canon A1 is my first film camera. Being a more video centric person in a digital age has always made photographed moments so taken for granted. Shooting on film changed my perspective on how I went about my digital work because there is truly something magical in the relationship between all the set up to getting the right shutter speed to prevent too much blur, while with a high enough aperture to still create depth to the moment I hit the shutter. It made me value the importance of each frame and gave me perspective of how powerful every moment should be to me.
My 852 tattoo was a huge part of my personal growth and re-evaluating my roots. Growing up in Hong Kong I loved our area code (852 or 八五二) and knew I would want ink of it. However, I wanted something meaningful. Something that allowed me to remember where I came from when I looked at it. So when I met Momo who specialized in ink work with ancient Chinese calligraphy (in this case Qin Dynasty) it was a no brainer for me to do a craft exchange with her and do a shoot for her. Working for an artist from home also felt like it healed parts of my torn roots. Since she is from mainland china and didn't speak much cantonese, we had to weave between Mandarin, Cantonese and English to fully communicate. That taught me that language barriers should not really affect understanding. To this day we still go on little wine nights where we still weave between three languages.
Week 6 Reading Response
So on the idea of memories, materialism and how we value our possessions. I heard a talk recently that we often consider things that are hard to acquire as things that are valuable, mainly because we deem them as things that we ourselves are not able to acquire. This is how things of low value but are difficult to attain get slipped into the list. Somewhere along the lines of society we decided that anything that was hard to get MUST be valuable and I think that has misdirected us as a community and species into harmful valuation of things we desire. I was a victim of this mentality early on as I came from a relatively toxic family culture where there was pressure to look successful and be successful without truly defining the term"successful". I stepped out of this mentality when I lost my father. This was something that was irreplaceable. Now the only possession I have of him is in my memories. These things mean nothing to anyone else, but to me it is the most expensive car or the biggest house.