"Singapore": Sleeping areas of the brightest city in Asia

Every day, photographers around the world are looking for new ways to tell stories or capture something we haven't noticed before. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors about what they wanted to say. This week is a series of "Singapore" by photographer Nguang, who grew up in Singapore and lives in New York. Nguang graduated from Northwestern University in Illinois and studied cinema for the first time. For the series "Singapore" about the real city, Nguang used a quote from Stuart Brand — the same one who was inspired by Steve Jobs and whose magazine Whole Earth Catalog perpetuated the phrase "Stay hungry. Stay foolish».

I shot the series in the old districts of the city, mainly in public housing, where most Singaporeans live. Ideas about Singapore are full of stereotypes — that it is a modern, brilliant, flawless and soulless city. What is the real Singapore?

I'm not really sure I know myself. Most likely, it is a young and rapidly changing city-state, which is torn between the past and the future. In fact, my series also speaks about this - about the tension between the old and the new Singapore.

I think of the country as a teenager who wants to portray its innocence and grace and at the same time its awkwardness and confusion in the face of what is to come.

The quote, which is the title of the series, from Stuart Brand's book "How Buildings Learn, What Happens After They're Built": "Children draw houses as unconsciously as they draw faces. Regardless of where they actually live, for the most part they paint the same house: one story, a door in the middle, two windows on each side, a pitched roof that can be seen from the facade, a central chimney with a swirl of smoke and a path leading to the door."

Although I was born and lived in Singapore, some time ago I was educated in Chicago, and after that I went to New York, where I was going to continue my film career. But I began to lose faith in stories with fictional ties and denouements.

Instead, I became interested in photography and fell in love with the impressive potential of the still image. Each of my photos is the middle of a story.

Unlike cinema, what happens before or after each situation in photography is completely subject to the viewer's imagination.

In most cases, my photos tell about life in big cities — a common theme of loneliness and longing that falls to the lot of all of us living in capitals.

Although there are a lot of themes and ideas in my work, for me the emotional contact of the viewer with the photos is more important than the intellectual one.

More than anything, I want my audience to feel.