Photos by Lung S. Liu
Seen through the lens of Lung Liu, a scarred victim of a motorcycle accident becomes buoyantly handsome. A half-nude woman lying in a condom-strewn alleyway transforms into a caricature of beauty. Photos from his series on the Downtown Eastside capture Vancouver’s ignored and isolated denizens, of those forced to live in SRO hotels or on the street. While Lung’s street photography lacks any candidness, the black-and-white portraits humanize his subjects without capitalizing on shock value.
Lung claims the beauty in his work is neither contrived nor created by him. “It’s everywhere. If you stop and really look, there’s something beautiful about everyone.” He spins around in his seat. “Like that girl right behind us, she’s fucking gorgeous!”
I lean past Lung and look. Until now, I hadn’t noticed the woman he points to. She hovers over a pile of textbooks, oblivious to us. She sips on coffee and nods her head in rhythm with the beats flowing out of her headphones. Sure, she’s moderately attractive, but gorgeous? I don’t see it. She’s not someone that would cause a look-back if passed on the street.
Lung continues unabashed. “Sometimes you have to just go up to someone and say you’re really lovely. People aren’t going to be weirded out.”
I don’t buy it. A random stranger claiming that you’re beautiful? Surely a hidden agenda would be assumed. It can’t be as simple as that, I tell him.
Lung’s out of his seat before I complete the thought. He walks across the café and taps the girl on the shoulder. The words “I just wanted to say you’re beautiful” float across the room. The girl smiles. A thank-you forms on her lips.
Lung sits down again nonchalantly. “Just like that,” he declares without a trace of embarrassment.
I look back at the girl. She hovers over the textbooks once again, only now the headphones remain off. The curved edges of her mouth betray the remnants of the compliment.
The confidence to approach and profess admiration to complete strangers is relatively new to Lung. Adolescence and his early 20s were marked with little social interaction. Friends were few, girls were admired from afar. His idea of fun on weekends during high school was memorizing Pi to 120 decimal places.
His social isolation may have been due to the upheaval in the formative years of his life. Born in northern Vietnam, Lung’s family fled to China during the war in the early ‘70s. Five-year old Lung spent the next few months in a refugee camp in Macao, before his family was sponsored for immigration to Canada by a church in British Columbia.
As with many children of immigrant families, parental pressure was placed on young Lung to excel academically above all others, to earn a prestigious and secure financial future. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, a path he initially followed: after high school he went directly to UBC and earned a degree in microbiology.
“The future was all set for me, and I couldn’t handle it,” Lung recalls. “I had ulcers because I was so stressed about academics. I had these fantasies about just getting away, seeing things I hadn’t seen before, about getting away from life as I knew it. I kept dreaming of things like going on a trip and finding a cave which exits into Shangri-La, where no one has to work, and people can be happy and do whatever they want.”
His relationship with microbiology after university was brief and bitter, lasting a mere three months. On the rebound, he started anew as a systems analyst for a market research company. Life outside of academia became mundane and routine: “I would wake up, have breakfast, go to work, come home, cook myself dinner, go to sleep, do the same thing every day. After three years I realized I couldn’t differentiate one day from the next.”
Lung knew he had to change, but logically he couldn’t figure out what needed to be altered. He was at a loss.
And then the planets aligned, and Venus entered his life.
They met at a costume party. Lung was dressed as a woman; Venus was into drag queens. She approached him and complimented his beauty, and they chatted throughout the night.
Their next rendezvous was on his birthday. For a present, she promised him a print from her photography. She showed him her portfolio, containing nudes of every man she had been friends with. Conservative Lung told her that he could never pose nude. His resolve lasted a full week.
They went down to Wreck Beach. While taking photos of Lung, she removed her own clothing to make him more comfortable. “That’s how I started photography. I thought: If she can do this, so can I.”
Venus moved to Montreal for film school a few months later. Hundreds showed up to her going-away party. Many were so affected by her departure that they literally burst into tears. Her life was in an opposing orbit to his: loved by many, chasing her true passions. The party was a catalyst for Lung: “I just realized that, wow, what was I doing with my life? I had no real ties with anyone, I was working at a job I hated, all for a nebulous goal that I really didn’t know.”
In a pitted moment, he made his first unplanned, irrational decision. He moved to Montreal as well.
Jobless and unable to parle français, resources became scarce in Montreal. Desperate for cash, he tried to become a dancer at Club Adonis, a gay strip club, even though he is straight.
But could he actually dance?
“No, but I figured I could work the small Asian kid angle. I figured I was the type that could attract the Bears, that I could be a cage dancer or something. It was the only thing I could think of that would give me money and time to pursue my photography.”
Quebec’s governmental employment agency saved him from cages and bears, however, by sponsoring him to learn French full-time. Freed from financial worries, he pursued his hobby of photography, and excelled quickly in both language and imagery.
Separated from structures of family and familiarity, Lung was forced out of his introverted shell, forced to experience life less passively. Two years later when he moved back to Vancouver, the reserved persona was gone, replaced by an outgoing, freer personality. As Venus had first approached him years previously, he now had the confidence to do the same.
The change in confidence parallels the evolution of his photography. Over the course of the past four years, his work has progressed from traditional nature shots to complex, narrative portraits. Lung credits the escape from introversion as the key to his work. “Everything you need to know about photography, the technical aspects of it, can be learned in a day. The difference between a great photographer and a brilliant photographer is just social skills, that’s all.”
His art has developed a large following on several community websites, such as Livejournal and Flickr. His four major series – centered on the Salton Sea, Northern Vietnam, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and Majico in Mexico – have won praise from viewers around the world, which has not gone unnoticed by photography community. Last summer, he was awarded Editorial Non-Professional Photographer of the Year by the International Photographer’s Association, an organization which annually draws in nearly 20,000 entries from over 90 countries.
“When you take a picture of someone, you take them at that moment you see something in them that reminds you of how you feel about them,” Lung says as my coffee grows cold. “Your audience will clue in on that.”
Lung’s gorgeous girl gathers up her textbooks and exits the café. She turns and glides past the window we sit behind. I look up as she nears, and comprehension comes together like the click of a shutter.
This woman will never be on the cover of Cosmo. She will never star in the next summer blockbuster. She will never drink Diet Coke on a commercial. And that’s the point. She’s beautiful in a way I have forgotten exists, gorgeous in a way that doesn’t require silicone or Photoshop.
I ask Lung if he ever falls in love with his subjects.
“All the time,” he says.
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