Typhoon Tales

Here's the newest piece from my recent show. Entitled 'Typhoon tales' it is cut into a 2m long silk paper scroll and displayed on a black paper background. Photographing such a strong red is frustratingly difficult so the photos don’t show the real colour.

As an expat living in Taiwan two things I'm aware of are the abundance of motorbikes and the annual typhoons. Local TV news crews rush out to the windiest, stormiest point and foolish reporters try to file their live reports. They stand in the howling wind and rain, clinging to some inanimate object while holding a microphone. Their reports always state the obvious, “It’s windy here and the rain is heavy.”

The other thing news crews do is to film other people out in the storm and they’ll always manage to find motorcyclists battling the winds and inevitably being blown off or getting stuck in floods. My question is why go out in such bloody awful weather on a motorbike?

In this silk paper cut my dancing boys fear no storm, but even they are beaten by the mighty typhoon as they get swept along in the wind, rain and flood.

Here's one of the preliminary sketches. I spent a long, long time on the design process making sure that everything would hang together and not collapse. Papercutting is as much about the ‘architecture’ of the piece as well as the image.