The making of Spectrum

Ever wondered what the concrete jungle looks like if there are more colors? Ever wondered what new ways we can explore the city? My zine Spectrum is an attempt to answer the questions, where minimalism, bold colors, and gestalt psychology meet. Featuring zoomed-in architectural photos in the order of a rainbow, it is about the art of observation and capturing the beauty of the banal of urban environments.

How it all started

It all started with my architecture photography experiment 'low_res.minimal' in 2017, back when I just started picking up street photography as a hobby. At that moment, I was both interested in clean sharp and colorful minimal images and photos of banal scenes like chairs on the road and building facades. I was questioning whether minimalism must be pristine and crisp, so I deliberately took grainy, tightly cropped photos of buildings in somewhat muted tones during my walks and commute with my smartphone. Some images were even taken far away from highway when the car was driving. In the same year the photos gained recognition with a feature on VSCO. The project eventually concluded as I felt it was the time and I didn't want to repeatedly do the same thing, but the obsession with minimalism and urban details stay and become part of my visual language, as the images can act as transitional, supplementary images in storytelling.

The formation and enrichment of narrative

The project started in mid / late 2023, when I'd like to make some photo zines. I reviewed my minimal architecture photos, and as a person who's sensitive to colors, I almost instantly spotted them being arranged in the order of a rainbow. And then I just simply placed them in a zine, nothing else. But a year later when reviewing the zine, I wasn't satisfied with the result at all, because I wanted something more – a solid narrative that makes the sequencing make sense instead of personal preference and randomness.

Therefore I started searching on web for ideas, from idioms of colors to what emotions are associated with the colors, but none of them worked, until I remember this sentence 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' and found out this is gestalt psychology’s core idea. It clicked with the photos immediately, because each zoom-in image depicts a part of the bigger building / urban environments, and if you're willing to look close enough, these fragments come together to form a new meaning (vibrant colors in the urban jungle), which is more than the sum of original elements. Moreover, these photos do not depict any landmarks or specific buildings, they depict building facades, construction mesh, staircases, walls, traffic cones, parasols... something that we tend to ignore or dismiss it as 'not pretty enough'. The zine becomes a demonstration on how the most ordinary things can be beautiful, almost in an inherent and poetic way.

But the idea development doesn't end here. To consolidate and enrich everything, I decide to add illustration. But what direction should I go? The key criterion is that it's to complement the photos instead of overshadowing them or being repetitive. I tested a bunch of ideas and styles, like depicting the similar scenes in the respective color, but none worked. So it's time to back to basic, I extract the architectural elements from the photos, and create small icons for them. And then at the last page, these icons come together to form an illustration of a city, meaning that the fragments have their own power and meaning to be gathered for something greater.

The zine Spectrum is my visual ode to the ordinary and invitation to playful perception, that even the most banal scenes hold beauty, uniqueness, and delight. It is the complete opposite of trauma trilogy (doppelgängers, play (with) me, the traum(a)'s kunstkammer), yet they co-exist – the world is a insane and dark place, but there's still a quiet yet vibrant side that's waiting to be discovered, and with all the streets and places untravelled, they make me to stay here a bit longer.