Victor Chin

At wherever your soul may be there will be people who will remember you and your family and love ones. There will always be those who will remember your work (though cut short by you sudden unexplained death) and will continue where you have left off.

You will always be one of the many true sons (past, present & future) of Malaysia.

The ability to understand someone else’s feelings as if they were one’s own is not something we do easily and often. It is demanding and thankless. Perhaps that may explain why most of us are mainly concerned with the needs our own self and those of our immediate family. How others feel is hardly our interest. How about considering some empathy?

My exhibition of photos Empathy at KLPac closed on the 8 March. This third collection of images of people with disability doing their own thing in sports and in work, was on display for 7 weeks. During that time there were several write ups about the exhibition and one of the portraits of Siti Aishah made it to the front page of the Sunday People in the NST’s Sunday Times.

This media coverage of the disabled group gave all those people in this small and fragile community a much needed visual profile which they seldom get. The Star newspaper’s writer Tan Karr Wei also wrote about the portraitures with understanding.

Then there was Elaine Lau from the Option of the Edge who also gave a voice to this often voiceless fellow citizens. Ng Suzhen from the Malay Mail was the first to put this story in her CyberSpot page. The Chinese press too especially the writer Chee Nyuk Yan from Nanyang Siang Pau gave this group a center spread in their Sunday edition and this was followed by Sin Chew Daily‘s reporter Ten Yien Hsia’s news of the event. I was also invited to talk about the exhibition on TV3′s Malaysia Hari Ini morning magazine show.

After all the effort of first going out to get the cooperation of all my disabled friends to allow me to photograph them, and then to mount and promote the visibility of the subject to a larger public, it had dawn on me that this project of promoting a little more empathy for others, has been all a group effort by everyone who has been involved. This is also a note of thanks to all of you. Now I am beginning to understand.

Two rotting pears

This new year began with major military conflicts in the middle east, the Indian subcontinent, parts of Africa and many other corners of the world.

Our world’s military history probably goes back to the beginning of our human race. Happily many of the warfares among neighbours in the past  had stop but many more are emerging each day leading to many unnecessary deaths and unimaginable sorrows for thousands of families.

I can’t help but start this year reflecting on the present day conflicts. This feature of our human life that we need to go to war and fight each other for what ever reasons or objectives.

Is this an unchanging nature of man and women? Are we all by birth and culture unneighbourly? When will we be able to live with our neighbours and care for our neughbourhoods ?

The Rose of yesterday, today and tomorrow. The Changeable Rose. Rose of Sharon

Who and what can we trust now that we are facing a global financial crisis? This situation, sooner or later, will effect our lives, threatening our savings, pensions, jobs, homes, education, families, friends, foods, environments, countries etc… . It is difficult for most of us to make sense of this confusion and despair, brought about, deliberate or otherwise, by the world’s political, financial leaders and those in power. And ourselves too, to a large extant is part of the system.

This photograph of the rose (above) from the flowering plant, Hibiscus Mutabilis, was taken from my garden, recently.  One of my Orang Asli friends from Kuala Krau in Pahang gave me a cutting of the plant. This vigorous bushy shrub has since started to flower. Each flower opens to about 10 to 15 cm wide, starts up as pure white in the morning, then changes to pink in the afternoon and finally, closes up as deep red by evening and drops off.

The cycle of the life of this rose and its transforming colours, offer me a a visual metaphor, to muse over the current, boom to burst, global financial situation, and to wonder what kind of world we have inherited- yesterday, today and tomorrow. I hope to share this image with someone else in whatever way they may like to view it.

If you have the time, you may like to check out this site Global Financial Crisis which I find informative. To add more tales to the plight, go to A Tale of Interesting Times

Peter Tan at a public phone booth. Recently he and some of his friends were checking out public accessibility facilities at the Sentral Station in Kuala Lumpur.

Peter and his wife Wuan

Peter and Wuan are keen photographers

Recently, my friend, Peter Tan, has transplanted my wordpress blog into this domain site. He was the one who give me the domain name, victorchin.com, as a present, when it became available. We first met each other, earlier in the year, when he came to the Sunday party I organised at the KLPac, where I was showing my collection of photographs of the disabled athletes.

He is a well known blogger for the disabled community advocating for better public accessibility for the disabled, the elderly and the rest of the populace who might one day need the facilities. Yes, anyone of us may one day need to be a wheelchair user or not be able able to see but needs to move around independently.

We have been meeting many times, often at his home or at shopping malls, and coincidentally he too has mentioned my name in his latest blog today. We seemed to have a special link.

Reading his blog, one finds him with many talents and skills and web design and related matters is what he does best. He works independently from his home in Kuala Lumpur. Please contact Peter, if you need web page solutions.