Literary critic Raymond Williams, in his musings of 19th century London in The Country and the City (1973), wrote that the great city is a paradox, that despite the absence of common feeling and a sense of a sharper perceptual confusion, there is also the promise of an evolving consciousness of a practical underlying connection and sympathy among the city’s inhabitants.
Perhaps, it is this kind of paradox as well that propelled writers and artists all over, including seasoned photographer and visual artist Chan Wai Teik to explore in their works this ambivalence, this sense of being in a place and an outsider at the same time, the fascination with death, rituals and everyday things that seem to be anachronistic yet at the same time suffused with the vitality of the present or the future.