Spectrum (2024)
A minimalist zine exploring color, perception and the beauty of the banal
Author's note: This zine is exhibited in 2025 Zine Day organized by Your Local Newsstand (Singapore), an independent publisher specializing in photography-based works.
What happens when minimalism, bold colors, and gestalt psychology meet? The zine Spectrum is my answer. A zine of zoomed-in architectural photos in the order of a rainbow, it invites readers to observe the mundane with fresh eyes, play with perception and part-to-whole relationships, and immerse in the quiet beauty hidden in urban environments.
The precursor of the zine is my architecture photography experiment 'low_res.minimal' in 2017, back when I just started picking up street photography as a hobby. Rejecting the idea that minimalism must be pristine and crisp, I deliberately took grainy, tightly cropped photos of buildings in somewhat muted tones, which in the same year the photos gained recognition with a feature on VSCO. The project eventually concluded, the fascination with abstraction and urban details remains and enriches my visual vocabulary when it comes to storytelling in street photography.
The first draft was completed in 2023, but I wasn’t satisfied with the result – I wanted to find a meaningful thread instead of only displaying the photos. Then the solution appeared in 2024, when I discovered gestalt psychology’s core idea: ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ This clicked with the collection immediately and became the backbone of Spectrum: each photo, a part of a building; each hue, a step in a chromatic sequence; together, a meditation on how we find and create meanings from fragmented visuals.
To strengthen the concept, I added minimalist drawings that depict architectural elements from the photos and eventually culminates in a final illustration of a cityscape. The result is simple yet thoughtful, mirroring the zine’s theme: complexity emerges from cohesion.
Spectrum is a lesson in editing for clarity — distilling years of photos into one evocative idea. Sometimes, the ‘simplest’ designs demand the most effort.
