CHIA Biography

I was born in the city-state of Singapore and moved to Belgium in the late 80’s. I currently reside in the beautiful city of Brussels that I now call my home base.

As a child I wanted to be an astronaut. My adventure into photography began when I permanently borrowed, a simple Kodak point and shoot camera from my mother when I was about eleven. During the nights, I would point it to space and photographed the stars. I was disappointed with the results. They were obviously underexposed. Later I would realise that the camera does not capture what the eye sees. Then on to discover that it could freeze a moment in space, in time. And my first steps into realising that imagination could be captured with the art of photography.

Growing up within harsh realities, my dream of putting on a spacesuit faded but my passion for photography remained. While climbing up the corporate ladder, I was feeling burned out towards the end. Then photography found me again. Took the plunge. Left my career and live my chosen life as a free-lance photographer.

If my photography needs a category, in a general term it would be travel photography and the use of available light techniques. Not the usual ‘beautiful and bright images’ of exotic destinations. Instead, I focus on the social aspects of the destination and its people. Mixing documentary photography with abstract to create an image. For me, the challenge is to capture all my emotions and imagination, putting them onto a two-dimension piece of paper that could speak without speech. Although I work with digital nowadays, my favourite medium remains the traditional manual camera loaded with a roll of black and white film.

In between my exhibitions, organising English photography workshops in Brussels and taking on the photography assignments that come along, I still travel extensively searching out places and images that call out to me to be photographed. My other interests include music, writing, the odd pub-crawl, scuba diving, karate and daydreaming.

Technique

One image,

One shot,

Zero manipulation,

Pure imagination.

 While the images presented in “Dreams in Dremaland” may not look like traditional documentary photography, they are at heart documentary/street photography – which is the basis of my work.

 Although captured by means of a digital camera, they have not been manipulated in anyway to create the effects you see.  They were captured live – at the moment of pressing the shutter button.  I am still very much an “old school” traditional photographer.

 The photographs presented are C-prints mounted either on aluminium or plexiglass.  Limited editions of 10.