ANAIS MAK KEVIN POON
Serial entrepreneur Kevin Poon, whose diverse business ventures include a clothing label, event production company and coffee shop chain, joined forces with Anais Mak, the fashion designer behind Jourden, to create a work about how we document our journeys
“The pictures tell an intimate story of Kevin’s loves, his family, his relationships and the things that have shaped his universe,” says Anais, of the collection of photos Kevin took with a film camera on recent travels to New York, Los Angeles, Thailand and Paris. The photos will be printed in a large hardback book. “It’s a very instinctive, very linear method of collecting what’s important to him.”
Kevin began shooting on film a year ago, and enjoys the mystery and anticipation involved when developing his reels. “I’ve been using some films that are discontinued or expired, so it’s a lottery how they will come out. It’s like having 100,000 filters on your Instagram and you don’t really know which one it’s going to use.” He has also written short poems to accompany the images. “These are collections of people or experiences or vibes that I’ve been getting,” he says of the photos. “It’s a little different than what people expect, I guess. The images and also the message—people don’t know me as a photographer.”
Anais, also working outside her comfort zone, has taken a virtual approach to travel with an interactive video to complement Kevin’s photos. Viewers will be able to navigate their way through an imagined world by making choices within scenes. “I wanted to let the viewer have the authority to have their own angle on the designed space that I offered,” she says, “in contrast to pictures, which are really linear interpretations and really voyeuristic.”
Their work is a comment on the proliferation of images in modern society and the way in which they are interpreted and used to shape identity. “I would consider myself the last of the millennial generation,” says Kevin. “We are quite ADD in how we process images—everything’s very fast.” Anais agrees that the way we perceive images has changed. “Every day we are bombarded with streams of images from different levels and all these images are trying to form a nonlinear narrative in your brain.”
Kevin and Anais say they hope the curated nature of their work offers some respite from this image saturation rather than adding to it, and they also just wanted to make something that resonates. “The struggles that I face have been faced by other people— life and love and loss,” says Kevin. “Hopefully people can vibe with it and get something out of it.”