Despite my efforts to take it easy this month, June's turning out to be busy. I'm heading to Chengdu this Friday for work, then off to Manila/Boracay next week to attend a wedding before I barrel northwards to Beijing for the remains of the long, hot, Olympic-splattered summer. Meantime I'm battling a headcold, which I seem to have picked up while racing a dragonboat this Sunday.
Incidentally, I've had three articles published recently:
A story on Hong Kong art galleries, with photos by me (sorry, no direct linkage to either, but you can find them in the print edition of Travel + Leisure Southeast Asia).
- A feature on Hong Kong's photographic-art scene in Hong Kong's freshly arrived Time Out.
- A story on a day in the life of Ken Yeh, deputy chairman of Christie's Asia. This was one of five pieces on leading art-world figures that together made up the cover story of this month's Art + Auction. I had the great pleasure of working on it with Chien-Chi Chang, a Taiwanese-American photographer who happens to be a member of the Magnum photo agency. This is one of my favourite pictures by him, taken from Time Bends, a poetic, deeply personal photo essay on the village he grew up in:
Of course, he also took some excellent reportage-style pictures for the Christie's piece, as did fellow Magnum veterans Christopher Anderson, Eli Reed and Richard Kalvar.*
* One of my favourite memories of the day (aside from a delectable strawberry millefeuille at l'Atelier de Joel Robuchon) comes from chatting with Chien-Chi during a preview of five paintings valued for auction at millions of dollars each. In front of us was a crowd of Perrier-Jouet-quaffing partygoers, and he said to me, memorably: "In a hundred years, everyone in this room will be gone, including you and me. The only ones left will be those five hanging on the walls."
