11/10/2025
When I first encountered the opportunity to participate in 1000 Tiny Artworks, my instinct was to decline. It came at a moment when multiple projects overlapped, my ideas felt stagnant, and the task itself seemed unnecessarily difficult.
Eventually, I decided to embrace it and keep it simple. I needed ten images, and my Mamiya RB67 produces ten exposures per roll. That became my framework and constraint: each artwork would be a single, deliberate frame from one roll of film.
I started at Teluk Bahang and followed the coastline down toward the Penang Bridge. That stretch of shoreline became the focus of the series. Along the way the landscape shifted from quiet beaches to fisheries, reclaimed land, and working ports, revealing how quickly a short coastline can change character.
After I developed the negatives, I wanted to present the photographs as contact prints, at a one-to-one scale with the film. There is no enlargement or cropping. What is seen is exactly what was recorded.
Holding these tiny prints in my hands, I felt an unexpected sense of attachment. They were the first works in some time that came from a place of spontaneity and genuine curiosity rather than hard briefs and external constraints.
This series is not about spectacle. It is about standing still, paying attention, and letting the image speak for itself. In a culture that constantly demands bigger, sharper, faster images, these quiet photographs resist the pressure to impress. They hold their ground at the scale they were born, reminding me that the act of making can be enough.
