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｢天の川｣ sea tiles: memories of the tides. 2025. Black and light grey riso ink on washi. 10 x 16 cm. (3.94 x 6.30 in).
This photo book is a reflection on and in accompaniment of my larger, sculptural waterfall flipbook—《起伏》 sea tiles: dreaming tides, gathering and unravelling—which comprised photograms that I made at sea under moonlight over multiple days. I travelled to the beach at night, plunged photosensitive paper into the water, activated my flash, and then developed the prints in a darkroom the next morning. Each photogram is a record (or ‘tile’) of the sea, capturing its energy and the environmental conditions of that precise moment.
I often refer to this current book—｢天の川｣ sea tiles: memories of the tides—as its compact cousin. For this book, I scanned those photograms and then reproduced them via risograph. It was important to me that I was printing white ink on black paper because in my mind, the subject is where the flash hit the water. Rather than using inkjet and relying on the white of the paper, I wanted to use white ink to print the subject itself, with the black reflecting the darkness of night.
Rather than reprising the waterfall flipbook structure, I went with the more typical accordion book structure, which allowed greater flexibility in sequencing and image layout. Now that the images had been scanned and digitised, I was free to crop, tile, and rearrange different sections of the prints while working on the layout of the content. The accordion format also preserved that sense of flow—through the flipping motion and the ability to fully extend the book to show the entire sequence at once—evoking the continuous movement of the sea.
天の川 refers to the Milky Way or the galaxy in Japanese, and I titled this work as such not only because the images remind me of the galaxy, but also because the direct transliteration of 天の川 is ‘river of the sky’, which beautifully foregrounds the relationship between the sky and the water body, the moon and the sea.
Copyright © 2021- Angelica Ong. All Rights Reserved.