‘The Picnic Ceremony’ was inspired by my childhood experience, growing up in a strict Buddhist family, I cannot avoid my trips to the temple every weekend or on Buddhist’s special holidays. My mum would cook plenty food to give offerings to the monks along with many other people who would join the ceremony. Then after the monks have chosen what they wanted to eat, the rest was left for us. So along with a lot of other strangers that we encountered from the temple, we share the food, we eat together and we communicate.”

“Picnic” is also a symbol of happiness and friendly atmosphere where people meet and greet. It is often used to symbolize joyous events. However, it is sometimes misused during WWII to send children to concentration camps or even in Britain, when orphanages used to send child migrants half away across the world against their will as an act under the official migration schemes which ran until 1970, by simply telling them that they are going for a “picnic”.

“This is one of the many reasons I have chosen to work with Black and white photography, to represent the often monochromic reality that we exist in and paint something slightly colourful, representing another parallel reality, a happy place, a picnic in our mind”

I captured the images in Black & White at picnics that I have been hosting since last summer around London, by sending invitations out, starting from people I know and ask them to invite others, this created a chain of strangers which creates a sense of community and interaction between strangers by sharing food. Then I printed the images on handmade papers, mostly Khadi papers using the liquid light process. The finishing is water colour painting, mostly I apply basic painting techniques such as splattering or pouring to only one simple brush stroke to creating a surreal surrounding against the monotonous backgrounds as if there is another parallel reality, similar to photography itself, where there’s the world behind the cameras and the world in front of the lens that the artists conduct for the viewers to see.