Artists’ comments
We were, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.
Mid-trek towards Inle Lake from Kalaw, our group rested in this village where we sipped on some somewhat-cool bottled drinks and water. Manuel and I (antisocial monsters that we were) went off to stretch our limbs and we ended up sitting in the large village square, which doubled as the school yard as well.
The kids were out playing with the simplest toys you could think of: Old bicycle tyres and a long sausage-like balloon. They invented their own games, made do and fixated on whatever toy they had in hand and they played with the wild abandon that we all did once.
Early childhood specialists sometimes advocate simple, open-ended toys to encourage imagination and allow children to engage in their own self-defined play. Think… wooden blocks, for example! Thinking back, I realise that my favourite play things weren’t even toys: Blankets, towels, cardboard boxes and mahjong tiles – because they could be anything.
Credits
Photograph by Manuel HQ
Post-processed and writing by Celeste Choo
