by Roland Buckingham-Hsiao

These photographs were taken with a Holga toy camera in the Far East; they represent research undertaken into Chinese and Japanese aesthetic principles and traditions of representation. The elements and principles of art have been used to translate the characteristics of Japanese short poetry - such as economy and the linking of dissimilar things - into the syntax of visual language. As "visual poems" however, the works consist entirely of the associations and allusions suggested by the images. The viewer/reader is left to decide or create the meaning as the poems are open-ended and meditative, having floated free of words