Do you believe in past lives? I do. Since everything but pure maths and music is a story, I decided a long time ago to believe whatever pleases me, and the idea of past lives pleases me greatly.
Every time I look at Fan Ho’s work I feel like I’m looking at a memory.
It’s possible that spending a few years in Taiwan gave me the sensory palate, the textural experience, that memory so loves much to draw on. But it feels deeper than that. Cellular.
Maybe that’s just the power of a gifted photographer: the ability to dissolve time and space, to immerse the future in the past. Ultimately, I suppose, to transpose their memory to the viewer’s. And isn’t memory so much like a dream or an imagined world? Shifting, cellular…
A toddler sits in a box on her mother’s lap facing a small fan and a television showing a first-person, front-seat view of a roller-coaster ride. As the roller coaster climbs and falls, slows and rushes, veers this way and that, the mother tilts the box, rattling it on the uphill, whooshing it on the downhill, switching the fan on and off, whooping encouragement as the child screeches with delight and the excitement of safe fear. This is the wildest experience she’s ever had and when she’s an old woman she’ll remember the time her mother took her on a roller coaster ride that lasted for hours.
If you have all your faculties about you, you can imagine yourself anywhere, at any time, real or imaged. Armchair time travel and teleportation, compliments of your clever brain.
Maybe it’s Fan Ho’s memory. Maybe it’s a past life. Either way, it’s all shifting, dreamlike, sublime subconsious alchemy … either story will do.
Fan Ho’s work is extensive and very easy to find. Pinterest is rife with his work and, of course, there’s the official site and Instagram account.
One day when my ship comes in I’ll be buying giant prints of his work and just staring at them for hours at a time, getting lost in Ho’s memory of my imagined past
Anyway.
Are you having a good week? I hope so. The spec fic/SFF event is coming together nicely and I’ll be able to send out details from next week I think. Oh! And I *finally* settled on a title for my new story. So that’s exciting.
Love and light, you strange little tree people
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TANYA MEESON 