Nana Chen-It's Personal

Chungking Mansions Project Featured in Pipeline Magazine

2012-01-13T08:50:00.000-08:00

Chungking Mansions is featured on page 48 in the January/February special issue of art magazine Pipeline Hong Kong | China | Taiwan

Southeast Asia is Flooding

2011-10-09T20:56:00.000-07:00

The worst floods hitting Southeast Asia in decades. The last few days.

Chungking Mansions Album 4

2011-10-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

Chungking Mansions Published on Invisible Photographers Asia

2011-09-07T09:18:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited. Photos showing my first impressions of Chungking Mansions have been published on Invisible Photographer Asia. Thanks to Nic Dunlop for a brilliant edit and ThingsAsian Press for funding the project.

Chungking Mansions 3

2011-09-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

Follow the Chungking Mansions project on Facebook here.

New Facebook Page Chungking Mansions by Nana Chen

2011-08-30T02:17:00.001-07:00

The Chungking Mansions post has created a lot of traffic and interest since I posted it five days ago. Yumi Goto, a photo editor and friend has urged me to create a Facebook page just for the photos. Here's the link: Chungking Mansions by Nana Chen. I will be posting the pictures regularly.

Thanks to Nic Dunlop and Dirk Claus for helping out with the picture editing and Andrew Marshall for editing the synopsis.

As it's a long-term project, I intend on returning to Hong Kong whenever I can to capture more photos of daily life.

Chungking Mansions I

2011-08-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

Squatting amid the luxury hotels and malls of modern Kowloon is a dilapidated structure resembling a dirty vent of a giant subterranean machine. This is Chungking Mansions, and how you feel about the place revolves around this question: Do you live there or not?

For non-residents—for most Hong Kong people—it is a hotbed of criminality: five blocks of pimps, hookers, thieves, and drug pushers that is best avoided.

For residents, it is one of Hong Kong's last bastions of low-rent multiculturalism, where Nepalese guesthouse owners rent out rooms to Thai office cleaners, and Pakistanis sell mobile phones to African traders who hire Indian cargo companies to ship them home.

For me, Chungking Mansions is an unloved remnant of old Kowloon. Until the early nineties, most of Kowloon was like this and worse. But soaring real estate prices and limited space on Hong Kong Island drove land-hungry developers across Victoria Harbour, and the Kowloon clean-up began.

Residents say Chungking Mansions will never be demolished. But look at the much bigger Walled City, once Triad-run and notorious, then demolished and rebuilt as the upscale Kowloon Walled City Park. Chungking Mansions, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year, will almost certainly be next.

Thus my obsession with documenting daily life there for ThingsAsian Press.

Windows--India

2011-07-23T09:48:00.001-07:00

Hue, Vietnam

2011-04-25T14:49:00.000-07:00

I took these one September night 2009 walking along the Perfume River in Hue, Vietnam. At night the residents all hang out by the banks. Dragon boats await passengers for an evening tour, children run around like crazy screaming because there's space to play, and a vendor pushing a large scale wheels it up and down the pavement waiting for someone to pay and see if they're overweight.

My Window II

2011-04-23T06:32:00.000-07:00

My Window I

2011-04-22T01:13:00.000-07:00

I've been working on the Window series for about four years, taking pictures of the window in the room where I stay or visit. Here are a few recent ones.

My Father Before Dinner

2011-04-22T00:23:00.001-07:00

I'm starting this blog to share what I shoot for myself. These are images I take when I'm sad, curious, or just having fun experimenting. They are of myself, my family, my friends, my things and whatever grabs my attention.

I begin this with a portrait of Pop getting ready to go to dinner with me and my mother in Saigon.