tabling at SF zine fest

Back in August, my friend asked me if I wanted her table at SF Zine Fest. I’m so grateful! Because of that, I was able to experience something new and push myself to actually put my art out in the world. SF Zine Fest is an annual event where zine-makers and artists come and sell their zines/prints/art/creations. I had attended several art book fairs (SFABF, NYABF, BKABK) with awe and fascination, but never thought I’d be able to be on the other end, selling my own zines.

I was really depressed for the months leading up to the event. I had felt severed from the part of me that simply enjoys the act of making art. Because of this, I procrastinated on prepping for the zine fair for a long time…until a week before the event, when I realized that I didn’t like any of my old zines and needed to make a new one.

So I sketched everything the week before and printed it at Max’s Garage Press. That week I shuttled back and forth between my home in San Francisco and the print shop in Berkeley. My life that week was sponsored by BART and Berkeley Bowl. No complaints.

I have to say, everyone I met at SFZF was incredibly kind and down to trade zines. I felt so much emotion: gratitude, nervousness, wonder, kinship, and connection. Zines that alluded to depression, anxiety, loneliness, dread, sadness…zines that I could tell the artist poured forth their heart into…an autobiographical zine about crying, a cute zine about the struggles of adulthood, an all-too-relatable zine about the doldrums of corporate jobs, all these things I’ve been wrestling with. Art is a vessel for feeling. That made me see more clearly why I want to continue making art. Though I’m far from the “best” (whatever that may mean), I have my own story to tell. I have my own sensibility and my own understanding of the world. I have things I feel and must say, and only I can say these things. Because nobody can read my mind or process my lived experience for me. Art helps me process life and get through each day; it’s my way of making meaning.

Note for future self: people (including me) actually really like personal zines. They’re not “too cringe” or “too personal.” That’s the whole point of art!

small streetside sketchbook pages

I got this small Midori notepad from a Don Don Donki in Singapore which is a general store where I could spend all my time…and possibly live in. This sketchbook has been really nice for the times when I want to draw something, but there isn’t a a bench nearby. With my lil notepad, I can just stand and sketch anywhere.

I also recently bought some gouache paints for a color theory class, so it may be time to get into plein air painting~*~*~ however, I’m also very lazy and am not sure how the logistics of having a legitimate painting set-up outside would work. @duttonart is a big inspiration who makes me want to paint out in nature, and he has a really lovely youtube series called Pedal & Paint.

平凡的日子在香港 daily life in hong kong

This was my favorite destination on my Asia trip, quite possibly because I got to stay here for 2.5 weeks and live like a local thanks to the generosity of my boyfriend and his family. I felt the most at home in HK out of all of the countries I visited. Public transit was extensive and cheap, and food was great (I still dream of curry fishballs). I love the contrast of the charming two-story trams (the 丁丁) cutting through streets below a family of modernist skyscrapers. And I miss the loud beeps of the walk signals at pedestrian crossings, signaling to the dense crowd of pedestrians that they can cross the street now and continue on their journey.

The city is eclectic, mixing old with new and east with west. There are remnants of HK’s past, but you have to look very closely. Most of the city’s past has been torn down to make way for skyscrapers, due to the scarcity of land. My boyfriend took me to Duddell Street and proudly gestured toward the last gas lamps in the city at the bottom of these cobblestone stairs. I never would’ve known if he hadn’t pointed it out, as there was no sign explaining its history or significance. Same thing goes with Central Market and Tai Kwun.¹ These were probably my favorite times during the trip.

HK is so dense, on a level I hadn’t experienced before. On New Year’s Eve, after watching the fireworks, I remember walking in a daze among the biggest crowd of people I’ve ever seen.

Culture: The contrast between different socioeconomic classes is stark. I notice that rich people display their wealth very openly, namely through material goods such as luxury handbags and watches. It seemed like there was a Patek Philippe store every few blocks. The coexistence of so many different kinds of people, from the elderly who you see participate much more actively in society, to the babies running around, was something I cherished. I truly was shocked to see so many babies compared to the San Franciscan young working professionals I usually see at home. It was really refreshing to feel immersed in a population so diverse in age and backgrounds, though ethnically homogeneous compared to the States.

After coming home to San Francisco, I have to say I’m invested in the culture, history, and future of HK. In Inner Sunset, I stood by a shelf and read the Lonely Planet travel guide’s historical overview of HK.² Randomly, I learned that HK has the world’s third largest art auction market behind NYC and London. The well-written blurb shed light on HK’s colonial past, its struggle for democracy, its extremely capitalistic-centric economy, and its cohesion of its past as a British colony and its present as a city-state.

1. I’ve been very interested in the relationship between the old and the new in cities and how the shape of a city evolves over time. What a joy it is to discover the archaeology and history of a city through its unassuming placards and signs. Jane Jacobs wrote about the importance of having both in The Life and Death of Great American Cities, and I recently read an interesting counterview from Matthew Yglesias titled “Commemorate history, don’t preserve old buildings.”

2. I was surprised by how little representation there was of East Asian countries in the history section. I am only now noticing how US-centric (and US-history-centric) bookstores are, which is to say that the locality and context of each bookstore is unique. I wish I had appreciated the unique regionalism of Japanese, Singaporean, and Hong Kong bookstores more. I don’t know if those books are even accessible here in the US.

Please enjoy these pictures I took in HK, which I developed at SHOWA in Causeway Bay!

singapore — dec 2023

Here are some very informal travel notes that I tried to maintain throughout my trip. I am using initials to protect the identities of my friends who have no idea I am even blogging about them…Singapore was a short but sweet trip, primarily to attend a wedding, which was lovely. I thought a lot about Plato’s Republic while in Singapore. My disclaimer is that I haven’t read the primary text, but I read the synopsis of it in Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. It’s hard not to think abstractly about government in Singapore because its government is truly everywhere and could be considered a well-meaning authoritarian regime…

12/15

• arrive to singapore in the morning and checked into hotel nostalgia
• lunch at tiong bahru market (j finally got hainan chicken rice)
• j went to run his bank errand while i sat in a mall. ate a cinnamon croffle and choked on the cinnamon, so i had to get boba…
• went to ion
• walked on orchard road and looked at a bunch of malls. so many malls. interesting history. there used to be many religious institutions that got displaced due to new development
• went home an hour early so that i could review my sister’s b-school essays. i am the best sister…
• dinner with penn friends in a hotel with 3 different kinds of crab!!! z is such a gracious host

12/16

• tiong bahru market for lunch again – got my period and did not feel great
• national gallery – gregarious docent dude
• met up with e and l. took a very long, rainy grab to the chalet. saw s!! got a big hug
• got dinner with soooo many penn friends at a hawker center. went to a beer garden afterwards

12/17

• separated from j and went to haji lane with k, s, a, and her bf to get nasi lemak. also had a really good pear sorbet ice cream.
• walked on haji lane like 3 times LOL b/c more people kept joining
• left to go back home to get ready. hectic hair curling…i need to plan in this time better. hair curling cannot be rushed
• WEDDING!!!! ❤ so beautiful. i teared up
• wedding dinner was good ! met some singaporean gov’t workers. i really liked a’s speech about memory (and not about memory?) and how b was fundamentally the same friendly person even without his memories – it reminded me of the movie memento that j and i watched. who are you without your memories?

12/18

• very late lunch in bugis
• national museum. cool exhibit on trees. a lot of singaporean pride, of course
• afterparty in a chalet. it was sweaty and hot, like a frat party. mahjong was fun!! ❤ kept playing even after the party heheheheh with l and e. j is really good cuz he’s strategic.

12/19

• 9am homey tour. so interesting. singaporean gov’t is really in everything e.g. public housing, city planning, family planning, congestion control. gov’t promotes a lot of early family building and helps young couples a lot.
• b gave a fantastic tour of the red light district, geylang. it made me really sad. it also made me think about how gov’ts think about society-building, and how peace is maintained. maybe they let bored men come to places like this and let them operate in the first place (brothels) b/c it’s better than them inciting revolution. also how sex workers are third-class citizens who have no chance of attaining singaporean citizenship. it’s all very strategic on the government’s part.
• went to marina bay sands with j and went to observation deck very quickly.
• duck tour in which i felt very nauseous and just tried to close my eyes. felt so tired.
• very beautiful walk from duck tour to lau pa sat along the water…
• satay at lau pa sat on the streets. i felt like i was going to faint b/c i didn’t eat enough all day
• a lot of social anxiety today i want to have kinder self-talk…i become so self-loathing so quickly. i am ok as i am! no need to be “more” or “different” or feel like i have to be like others.

tokyo, japan — dec 2023

Tokyo! I went on an Asia trip in the end of 2022 and added Tokyo to the itinerary impulsively when Japan announced it would open its borders. Most of these photos are from my last day, which consisted of wandering around Shinjuku, eating ramen and roaming malls. I failed to shoot pictures the first few days—I just wanted to soak everything up without diluting the experience with my camera.

I broke my stomach on this trip because I ate too much everyday and lost my appetite completely on the last day. It was so sad because I would stare at strawberry shortcakes and feel no desire to eat them, which is off-character for me. I look back on another painful memory and laugh: J and I brought too much luggage—we each had one large checked bag and one carry-on. So we were dragging these bad boys all around Tokyo on the subways. People gave us funny looks as us two humans took up so much space on the trains. I think J ended up pulling a back muscle too.

My favorite part of Tokyo, and of any city, really, is walking through small streets and alleyways and peering into quaint cafes. The stores are so eclectic, each with its own character and accumulation of decorative knick knacks. If each store is its own world, Tokyo is a complex network of countless miniworlds. I know it’s the largest city in the world, but it’s shocking how dense it is throughout. I hope to be back soon and get lost in Tokyo again.

All photos shot on an Olympus XA using Portra 400 film. Developed at SHOWA in HK.

yoshi!

some drawings and a postcard

postcard + collage from dear Suze.

I recently took a figure drawing class at the Sharon Art Studio. Will share some drawings soon! This lovely class reinforced my reckoning that what makes me feel fulfilled is making art. Having time to create and see the world detailedly is a privilege. I will always make space for this.

Trying to do more plein air + looser plein air.

kash and annie in LA

Kash and Annie in LA means we are eating until our stomachs hurt and laughing so hard while driving on the highway that we cannot breathe. This is a very late update from my trip in February to LA to visit Kash.

I’m so thankful for Kash. When I arrived at her place, she had a cute sticky note saying, “Welcome to LA Annie Poo Su!” next to two Asian bakery pastries for me. She drove me all around LA. So generous and sweet, wanting to maximize my experience and show me all the best places.

In LA, life feels so much easier and freer. People drive and are free to go anywhere. Eat good food. Laugh with friends. Bask in the sun. Sometimes eat tacos. My favorite moment from the trip is laughing myself silly when Kash recounted absurd/crazy stories.

Shot on Olympus XA