Dwelling 居 - Myanmar

As my work needing me to travel to Myanmar, I have been coming back and forth to this beautiful country since 2010 and have been photographing Yangon at night - 仰光之夜 for long period of time. For people who never visit this country, majority of people are very poor, but they live happily with what they have and surprisingly the criminal rate is very low, therefore I have no problem wandering alone at night(just beware of stray dogs, you have been warned). Communication is not a problem even though they don't really speak English, I have learned a little bit of Myanmar language since my stay there, added up with body language would do just fine.

To be honest, if you are into street photography, it's a must-go country, most of life activities are happening on the streets, and they usually greet you with smiling face when you are photographing them. 

This year, I commit myself to the solo art project called Dwelling 居(the word dwelling, refers to a shelter in which people live), aimed to produce a body of work showing and documenting the living environment of Myanmar people at night, avoiding all those fancy tourist locations at all and rather stick to the places where they actually live, which allows me to talk to the locals, encountering drunken masters(if drinking everyday makes them a master) and listening to guitar(one of the cheapest music instrument that they can afford) music at night. One of the thing I notice is we never actually look at the house in detail(even our own home), often time we just walk by any houses and never stop by. 

About architectural design of their houses, I don't have single word to describe them(spontaneous style?), you can find bamboo/wooden/brick houses in their housing area so each of them is unique in their own way, there's no room but just partitioning inside most of the houses, with windows wide open without proper curtains. With the country opens up to the world, I'm not sure if I'm going to see the same thing 20 years from now, I can't tell if the transition is good or bad but definitely it will create great impact to their surroundings and affects the way they live.

If I have to describe how I feel about their current living environment - tranquillity would be the word.

Here's the video I have created for this project with total 32 images. The whole set of images can be found in my photography site.

My gratitude goes to those people who I have met during the journey of photographing in Myanmar, and thank you for sharing life stories of yours. I wish I can spend more times with you guys.

The lovely uncle and aunty who invited me to their house for light supper

The handsome group of people who tried their best to explain to me about their living places even though they don't speak English well

Last but not least, the drunken masters

To the people of Myanmar, good bye and see you next time!