Finally found some time to revamp my personal/portfolio website. It's been a long while. Long story short, this site is still a work in construction. Expect changes.
I'm Kevin. There is a long line of stories I can tell about my names: passport, birth, legal, pseudo, etc. But it's Kevin that stays and stands out. I sometimes think of myself as a scallion cookie. It's an absolute treat, but no less a challenge and in a certain sense, a confusing piece of work. Neither here, no there. A savoury pastry... a dramatic issue lighting up the velvety winter night.
To quote the iconic Legally Blonde song: depending on the time of the day, I could be a nerd, a perfumehead, an ethusiast photographer, or just chiling and baking my Madeleines. I mean, who doesn't like a blast of lemon in their cakes?
Professoinally, I'm a computer scientist (though sometimes I feel I enjoy the engineering part slightly more). I did my BSc in computer science at NYU with a focus on distributed systems. Afterwards, I worked for a smartcard-based security solution provider for a few years. This and the increasing cyber censorship back home and across the world convinced me that there's a duty to defend our privacy and security in the digital/cyber world. That's why I'm currently pursuing a MSc in computer science at Saarland University and working closely with my supervisors at CISPA. I hope to make the right to privacy more than a mere ideal, to bring them to your phone and that of everyone's, to ensure no one's getting tapped be it over the walls or the wires. Ultimately, I want to see the right to privacy implemented as a fundamental human right.
*I'm considerably good at my prefessional work. Check out my CV for concrete proof.
Just like the shock of scallion cookies, many found a bit unexpected that I also trained for arts. But it's really not that extraordinary. I did another BSc in interactive media arts at NYU. The name might sound a bit confusing, but it really just means digital arts that focus on the interaction with the audience, contrary to the conventional ones where it is more of a monologue of the author. We worked a lot with environmental sensors, Kinetics and computer visions to create pieces that senses the presence and movements of audience and react to them. We also worked with a wide range of media to explore the possibility of live arts - light projection, wearables, texttiles and dresses, scrap metals, 3D-printed structures, woodworks even. At the end of the day, it was admittedly a bit of chimera, what we did: bits and pieces here, bits and pieces there. But it was great fun.
Many of my friends went on to work/study in related fields, and it warms my heart every time seeing their incredible works. I chose a different path, but I believe that care and enthusiasm we had for humans through means of technologies, stay and shine through if you just know where to look at.
It's not a secret that photography is about light. A fter all, that's what the word meant from the beginning: etching light. But there's so much more to a photo... the depths of emotions, memories and all those too complicated, too painful, too heart-trembling to be ever expressed in the pale of words, all condensed into a single instant in time. They are like those cup-sized beacons one sometimes see travelling night trains in Europe, shining mutedly but nobly shades of purple, reminding one that home awaits.
Find my photo diary here. I do shoot a lot more portraits but for privacy reasons, most of them I cannot show here.
If you have ever wondered, the name of this site loq-yu is the romanization of the Wuu (Shanghainese) word for to rain. My language situation is a bit of a mess, but as it so happens, right now my sitauation of home is also a bit of mess.
I grew up speaking Shanghainese (or more specifically, an eastern variant of it) and later on Mandarin as the lingua franca. Sometimes I find it very hard deciding which one is more native to me, or if I should just count both. I love Shanghainese a lot more than Mandarin though. I mean, it might sound silly to have affinity for languages, but Mandarin is more of a work/professional language for me. Shanghainese is my language of rain and mists, of taros and rice fields, of cormorants and snakeberries, of typhoon and sweat-soaked shirts... of quarrels and kisses. It's the language of my beloved, albeit ever so slightly estranged, homeland.
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