LOOK INSIDE: In Search for Meaning

‘This book demonstrates what potential lies for creativity and insight in the fertile ground of open-mindedness. Felisa’s appreciation for different cultures and perspectives allows her to feel at ease and at home in the world— a true epitome of a global citizen. Different art forms merged so elegantly into one—photography, literature, and bookmaking—this work brings forth a very profound and important message that promotes unity and harmony with oneself and all others. I hope that this work can become an exemplary inspiration on how to see the world through a wider point of view for the young generation in the nation and the global community at large.’

—NYOMAN NUARTA, Indonesian contemporary sculptor, founder and owner of NuArt Sculpture Park (Bandung, Indonesia), conceptor and creator of Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park (Bali, Indonesia)

‘When you see a Felisa Tan photograph, something connects. It feels universal yet personal, just as the images seem as concerned with the suggestion of what is not in the frame as what is. Bombarded with imagery in our lives, these have a seemingly effortless ability to engage you, tapping into your subconscious. The silent and spontaneous observations of what we routinely pass by or even dismiss are both empirical and enquiring. Felisa creates a visual poem for us to linger upon, reawakening ourselves and asking us to look again. It is a bit like déjà vu, reminding you of something that was already yours. Later, your mind casts back and you realize that the images are etched indelibly. They are still there, still communicating—formulae and stereotypes become victims as optimism and liberation prevail.’

—JEREMY HORNER, leading documentary photographer, former regular contributor at publications such as National Geographic, GEO, and Condé Nast Traveller, author of Island Dreams Mediterranean and Nirvana

‘Twelve years ago I had a chance meeting with curator and author William Fox. He looked at my work, then asked, “Show me something that can’t be seen.” I pondered this question overnight, thinking that Bill had had too much wine and surely I had to see it if I was going to photograph it… Eventually, the penny dropped. He was asking me to photograph an emotion, an idea; what was physically in front of me didn’t matter. That was the greatest leap forward I have had in photography. It is that very notion that I observe in Felisa’s work. She has created the book I have always wanted to make. The work is strong emotionally, clever in its simplicity and speaks of our relationship with nature. The hand of man prevalent in all but a few images—it is an enlightened contemporary diary of her travels, thoughts, and vision. Felisa has shown us something that can’t be seen.’

—CHRISTIAN FLETCHER, award-winning landscape photographer and gallery owner based in Southwestern Australia, author of West: Photographs of Western Australia

‘Felisa Tan’s work will inspire joy and appreciation in the human heart. When you connect to this book, you are left deeply curious about the world around you; your concerns fall away to allow you to connect to the true beauty and wonder that exist here in the present moment.’

—LODRO RINZLER, author of The Buddha Walks into a Bar, Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher, co-founder of MNDFL meditation studios in NYC

‘Life is a collage of moments woven together through time, and Felisa Tan has managed to capture this beauty of life in the meditative book In Search for Meaning. This is a book that needs to be on every coffee table, something to pause, reflect and simply Be in this moment with.’

—TOM CRONIN, Vedic meditation teacher, founder of Zen Academy transformational leadership development programme, speaker, co-author and co-creator of the book and documentary film The Portal

In Search for Meaning

Photography and Writing by Felisa Tan with a Foreword by Kevin Ballantine

To you, the artist of your life,

If this book ends up in your hands, it means all the forces of the Universe have conspired for the crossing of our paths—the meeting of our consciousness.

Through our encounter, I hope I can inspire you to walk through life with mind awake and eyes open. The photographs that you are about to see show that any moment of any ordinary day has the potential to enlighten your mind and move your heart, if you let it. Wisdom is simple, yet it is elusive.

It can only appear in a mind that is still, open, and attuned to its surroundings, and above all, itself.

As you dive into these pages, you will come across a variety of instruments that artist photographers use to bring beauty and meaning, otherwise buried, to light. Beyond technicalities, there lies the foundation of openness, intuition, alertness, attention, timing, the enthusiasm to know, the patience to wait, the courage to move closer, and the willingness to contemplate. And I am here to remind you that these very instruments are inside you too. They are an integral part of how we naturally experience the world, but we have to be aware of them if we are really going to cultivate and use them to navigate through life with a fresh and deeper perspective.

It is amazing how the world changes as we do. I have felt it myself, and I hope someday you can feel it too.

Thank you for coming here and giving me a chance to do a good deed. I hope you will return home with mind more awake and eyes more open, as a wiser and happier human being.

Sincerely, Felisa

7.42 am, Saturday, August 17, 2019. Felisa has asked me to write something. The sun blazes across Murchison St.

Over the back-fence, shafts of light slice horizontally through the workroom like the bar of Caravaggio’s Calling of St Matthew.

It’s winter here in Perth, always summer in Jakarta. Wrapped in a chic long coat and a mischievous friend in tow, Felisa strode into the photo lab straight off the Rue de Seine.

Hair cut like an ‘80s rock star, Felisa was a Patti Smith fan.

A few years later she turned up in a class. The same sweet smile and cheeky eyes. She became a Stephen Shore fan, and Joel Meyerowitz too. I became a Felisa Tan fan.

Kevin Ballantine

Kevin Ballantine (b. 1950–) is an artist photographer based in Perth, Western Australia, whom I was lucky enough to meet as a lecturer while finishing off my undergraduate studies in Edith Cowan University in 2015. Although my major was not in the art faculty, I took an art elective unit called ‘Photomedia Aesthetics and Histories’, and that was how I became his student. Little did I know that this brief part of my life was going to be a momentous one to my growth as an artist.

To me, Kevin embodies what I call the ‘intelligent artist’ archetype. We bonded over talks of New York street photographers and Paris in the old days; and I always remember how he said ‘It’s forever…’ when he spoke of how he always feels his sense of Self dissolve at the beach. Kevin carries within him a beautiful mind and the kind of youth that even time can never rob from him.

So, here’s to Kevin, the man and the child, with his bright-coloured metallic Skullcandy headphones, black T-shirt, and camel-coloured fedora hat:

Thank you for your relentless belief in me, for our conversations about art and philosophy after class, for introducing me to photobooks, for showing me that a great work of art is not necessarily the most beautiful one, but the one that makes us feel; and most of all, for being yourself.

Gratefully Always, Your Humble Student,

Introduction How It Began An Innocent Pursuit

I began photographing in 2007, when I was fourteen. While having always loved visual arts since a tender age, my first notable exposure to photography was when I came upon DeviantArt, a social network for artists of all genres where they can share their work and connect, which I knew from the computer screens of a group of art-loving seniors back in school.

What happened was I spent my recesses and lunchtimes browsing for and downloading pictures from the internet—in which DeviantArt was a source— everyday in the school library, because our network connection at home was rather slow. After months of browsing, I began to notice that there was one face that kept showing up in the search results, whose photographs of never failed to catch my attention—this young man with ‘emo’ hair and sapphire-blue eyes. So, I decided to find out more about him and soon discovered that his name is Alexandre Evans (now @alexevansphotography on Instagram).

One thing that I admired about him (aside from his handsome face) was that he made many of his works—mostly self-portraits—at home; and although he was only eighteen then, he already had a large audience on the internet. (Remember, this was way before Instagram and ‘celebgrams’.) That really inspired my fourteen-year-old self, and I thought, ‘Wow! You don’t have to go too far to make art. You can do it from the comfort of your own home.’ In a flash, I understood that we could be anything we want to be, so long as we could consistently strive to turn our dreams into reality. So, my life transformed. I started to notice hidden beauty near me and the little details of daily life that would otherwise be missed. Without further ado, using my simple point-and-shoot camera, I began making photographs of anything I found intriguing, whether at home or outside.

Fifteen Years Later In Search for Meaning

Now fifteen years later, I have evolved, and so has my approach to art. Most of my earlier works are a reflection of my attention to aesthetics, and how colours and shapes describe the world. However, as I grew up, I dug deeper and have come to reconsider what photography means to me. Art, to me, has become more than a mere medium for self-expression, but above all, transcendence. It unites me with the Sublime. The most inspiring works of art are not those that put forward the sense of identity of the artist, but those that open the door to self-awareness, which is the foundation of spiritual consciousness. Art helps us to reconnect with the deepest core of our being, reminding us that there is something greater than ourselves. I believe that any art form should help liberate us, not chain us tighter to our egoic sense of Self.

The world speaks to us in different ways at different times of our lives, and in some small ways I honour that, by raising the camera and pressing the shutter. After fifteen years of making photographs, it has dawned on me that a large part of photography is about being in tune with our deeper selves and the world around us. When what happens outside strikes a chord with what is inside, that is the essence of the moment—and that is when the artist should make the photograph. And it is also somewhere within that subtle series of sub-moments that I always ask myself: ‘Why is this so captivating? What about this appeals to my sense of wonder? What does this mean to me?’ Wherever I go, I search for meaning.

The subjects that fascinate me are substantially varied. Sometimes I am transfixed by the emptiness of a scene, at other times by the chaos. Sometimes I am drawn to the vibrant richness of colours, at other times to the mute lack of it. But one thing is certain, in the midst of space and light, I always find meaning. Most of the time I am able to articulate why or how, while the other times I cannot. It is in my instinctive impulse to seek for answers, but as I grew older (and hopefully, a little wiser), I learned that language is a limited human construct. Just because we are unable to word things out, it does not mean they are meaningless. If anything, most of the essential things in life are inexpressible. Thence, I have learned to accept and appreciate beauty as it is, without always having to reason why. As Ralph Waldo Emerson eloquently conveyed in his poem ‘The Rhodora’ (1834), ‘If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty has its own excuse for being.’

It is also worthy to note that oftentimes my pictures do not describe grand things or places, and sometimes they are not grand pictures—but they mean something to me. And through the sharing of this subjective meaning, I hope to inspire the audience to appreciate the world around and inside us, to reconnect once more with the universal fabric of consciousness, which contains all the Truth we need to know, but is oftentimes buried by unawareness in our daily lives; and ultimately, to celebrate this grand infinity we share.

Therefore, I present to you this book—a tribute to light, the sense of sight, and the vision it gives, outside in. This work is none other than an invitation to see and experience life in all its unadulterated fullness, both outward, and above all, inward. I hope that it can offer you a new way of looking at the world.

Beauty is everywhere, if we only know where to look.

Claremont, Western Australia, 2017

South Fremantle, Western Australia, 2015

Previous Page. Human beings have a unique capability for symbolic thinking. Painting or engraving one’s name, one’s lover’s name, or a date on the wall is an act of vandalism that cannot be interpreted as a destructive impulse alone. It is not every time that one’s heart beats with such intense emotion that it urgently calls for a wall, a stone, or the bark of a tree to be communicated, documented, and immortalized.

The primal need for self-expression and documentation has appeared in human beings since the dawn of humankind. Our ancestors began carving shapes on rocks more than 40,000 years ago, and now graffiti has become a popular urban medium for self-proclamation—an evidence of one’s egoic identity reinforcement, an innate desire to pronounce oneself and leave a mark in the world. The wall is a sacred place. Containing layers and layers of joy and pain, it is a collective scream on the voice of humanity; it is raw, vulnerable, and real.

Dubrovnik, Croatia, 2016

If we could only understand the beginning of everything, perhaps we would be truly humble beings. As Charles Darwin said, from so simple a beginning, all forms of life evolve according to the laws of nature. Change, impermanence, and evolution are the mechanism through which the process of existence perpetuates. It is an essential part of Life and all its beauty.

Jellyfish

Jakarta, Indonesia, 2017

Who would expect to find Rodin’s The Thinker in a rural village in Japan? But there he was, sitting quietly at the back porch of a house amidst the falling snow, deep in thought, undisturbed... He did not call for attention, yet I saw him. I felt like I was entering a scene where I was not supposed to be in, for I would intrude a private space; but the scene moved me, so I braved myself to take a breath, made this picture, and left quietly.

The Thinker

Shirakawa-go, Japan, 2017

Cottesloe, Western Australia, 2015

Barbie Dolls

From up there, we all look the same. However, amidst this truth of unity, human beings seem to be perpetually on the quest for a solid unchanging identity. Is it important to distinguish oneself from the rest? What does one’s sense of Self mean in the universal scheme of things?

Cottesloe, Western Australia, 2014

Labadee, Haiti, 2017

Granada, Spain, 2009 Dead End

Sometimes we reach a dead end. In that case, start again.

Sunshine and rain make a rainbow. The coming together of pleasure and pain is what gives life its colour, texture, and flavour. Each experience accumulates to compose a grand work of art, of which we ourselves are the artists.

Jakarta, Indonesia, 2010

Artist Biography

Felisa Tan (b. 1993–) is a self-taught artist photographer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Beginning with making photographs at home and posting them regularly on DeviantArt in 2007, photography has become a language she chooses to express her love for the world with. Having been exposed to extensive travels to over 50 countries since a tender age, she has developed a deep appreciation for different cultures and perspectives, and created a record of the way she experiences the world as she undergoes a continuous process of evolution, both as an artist and a human being.

Honouring beauty as it is, she aims to keep her work as accurate as possible to her real-life encounters. The breadth of her subjects is a reflection of her sensitivity to perceive beauty, even in the most ordinary places. Through her work, she hopes to inspire her audience to pause and cherish the myriad blessings that might otherwise be left unnoticed in a world of noise.

Recognition and Achievements:

The Print Swap Holiday Exhibition, Root Studios, New York City, USA, 2018

Official Visitor-Photographer at Perth Royal Show, Claremont, Western Australia, 2017

Instagram Weekend Hashtag Project, 22 September 2015

DeviantArt Daily Deviation, 17 January 2011

To connect with Felisa, please visit www.felisatanphotography.com, or follow her on Instagram @felisatanphoto.

Acknowledgements

This page is always one of my favourites in any book. It is a reminder that we all owe part of any journey we embark on to those willing to lend a helping hand along the way. Like all compounded things, this one—of images and text—owes much to the many people who believed in it and offered their support. Wherefore, needless to say, both friends and strangers alike contributed to make this journey and this book not only possible, but above all, richer.

First among these is my then-lecturer Kevin Ballantine, without whose sincere guidance in teaching me how to see and generous sharing of insights, my understanding of photography as an art form would not have advanced this far.

My heartfelt thanks and gratitude to Febrina Ay, whose great artistic sensibility, enthusiasm for the work, and insightful experience and skills as a book designer conceived this elegant design.

I must, of course, thank the many people at Goff Books, whose genuine belief and support in my project brought it to the exquisite finish we have here. Every one of them showed passion and commitment that made this publishing an exciting experience. They are: Gordon Goff, for his far-sighted vision, openmindedness, and goodwill; Federica Ewing, for arranging meetings and for her hospitable helpfulness since my first time communicating with Goff Books; and Jake Anderson and the rest of the expert team, for directing the publication of this book so caringly throughout the whole process, from design to production. All of you have greatly contributed to turn the dream of a young girl into reality, thus giving her the gift of a lifetime.

My everlasting gratitude and thanks to my spiritual teachers, who ceaselessly remind me with their timeless wisdom, to never waste the Now and postpone living; for the Present is Life itself, and it is all we ever have. For the past two years, every morning upon waking, I ask myself, ‘If today were my last day in this life, what would I do?’ This question has empowered me with so much courage and determination to make this book come true. This body of work thanks you, and I thank you deeply.

My family has created a living environment that in one way or another has conditioned conduciveness for my nourishing of creativity, exploration of the inner world, and expansion of the mind. I remain grateful for this priceless privilege.

I am truly fortunate to have had the support of my dearest friends who have so kindly expressed appreciation for my photographs and writings. They see through my work, without me even asking. Although I have told you many times that your words keep me going and that they never get old, I am here to once again let you know that they are still as meaningful to me now as they were then. Your sincere appreciation have fuelled me time and time again, letting me know that in some small ways, what I do makes a difference in someone’s heart, and that is worth everything. You know who you are. I wholeheartedly appreciate and cherish you.

My DeviantArt, Facebook, and Instagram friends who have inspired me with their work and responded to mine. Their positive remarks throughout the years have helped me to build confidence in what I am capable of offering to others.

Furthermore, I ought to send my utmost gratitude to my treasured mentor and best friend Guido Schwarze; for always kindly, joyously, tirelessly, and upliftingly taking the role of a full-time confidant, advisor, and occasional grammar aid while this book was a work in progress, for his empathic sensitivity, critical mind, diverse points of view, and voluntary willingness to get to know this work intimately, and most of all, for his invaluable and irreplaceable gift of genuine faith in me and my work, and constant compassionate encouragement over the past two years in bringing my first book to fruition, hence giving me the best present imaginable. Without you as the pillar of my emotional cornerstone, this book would perhaps still remain as a silent manuscript in my archive until now. Though your benevolent deeds of kindness can never be fully repaid, I owe you one.

And last, but certainly not least, I would like to express my most fervent respect and earnest gratitude to all vagabonds whose paths have crossed with mine, who have presented me—in their own individual ways—with abounding opportunities to grow and flourish as a human being, in my search for meaning, in this far-reaching journey of existence. For all of you, I am eternally grateful. Thank you.

Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design

Gordon Goff: Publisher

www.goffbooks.com info@oroeditions.com

Published by Goff Books

Copyright © 2022 Felisa Tan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying of microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher.

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Photography and Text: Felisa Tan / @felisatanphoto / www.felisatanphotography.com Foreword: Kevin Ballantine / www.kballantine.com

Book Design: Febrina Ay / @afebrn

Project Manager: Jake Anderson

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-957183-01-5

Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Inc. Printed in China.

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