Built to Vanish: Ritual​,​ Fire and the Afterlife

Built to Vanish: Ritual, Fire and the Afterlife Curated by Kenneth Wong Hong Hooi Liew (Sean) photographs the Hungry Ghost Festival at the threshold between appearance and disappearance. His images move through the ritual life of Tai Su Yeah, also romanised as Da Shi Ye: from the imposing presence of the paper-and-bamboo effigy and its attendant figures, to acts of prayer and preparation, and finally to combustion. What begins as colour, structure and collective labour becomes flame, smoke and ash. Yet the photographs resist treating this passage as mere spectacle. They ask what remains when an object made to vanish is fixed as a digital image. Sean approaches the festival through the instincts of street photography and photojournalism, but his series extends beyond straightforward documentation. Frontal compositions register the effigy’s monumental scale; close views isolate ritual implements and handmade surfaces; candlelit scenes locate devotion in gestures performed at ground level. At other moments, zoom-racking and intentional blur fracture the image into pulses of colour and light. These shifts in focus are not simply effects. They echo a ritual world in which presence is provisional and the visible continually opens onto the unseen. The series is especially timely as the British Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale prepares a UK–Malaysia commission inspired by Malaysian Chinese ritual paper architecture and the Hungry Ghost Festival. That project proposes impermanence as an architectural logic and follows how living traditions travel, transform and endure through migration. Sean’s photographs offer a vital parallel—and a necessary caution. A ritual structure is never only an ingenious recyclable building system, nor is burning merely an elegant metaphor for regenerative design. Its making, use and release are embedded in cosmology, skilled labour, reciprocal obligation, local association and care for both ancestors and wandering spirits. The question, therefore, is not whether this tradition may enter an international pavilion, but how it travels, who speaks through it and what forms of accountability accompany its translation. When ritual is relocated from Penang’s streets and temple grounds to the architecture of a national pavilion, it risks being detached from the communities, temporal rhythms and spiritual relations that give it meaning. Visibility can honour a tradition, but it can also convert living practice into cultural material for global consumption. The presence and authority of named artisans and ritual communities must remain central, rather than functioning as evidence beneath an institutional narrative authored elsewhere. Sean’s work keeps returning us to the social ground of the festival. People gather beneath the effigy, tend flames, prepare offerings and conduct rites; makers’ hands and worshippers’ bodies continually interrupt any fantasy of an autonomous monument. Even his most dramatic images of fire do not present destruction as an endpoint. Burning completes a passage. The structure fulfils its purpose by leaving the visible world, while memory is redistributed among participants, photographs and future repetitions of the festival. Built to Vanish positions photography within this tension. The camera preserves what the ritual releases, producing an archive from an event whose meaning depends upon disappearance. Sean does not resolve that contradiction. Instead, he makes it perceptible: the saturated splendour of an effigy before burning, the intimacy of offerings placed in darkness, the instability of a zoomed image, and the fierce instant when architecture ceases to be an object and becomes an act. Here, impermanence is not an aesthetic resource to be extracted. It is a living relationship—made collectively, understood locally and renewed through return. Artist Statement This photographic series traces the temporary life of Tai Su Yeah, also romanised as Da Shi Ye, his attendant figures and the offerings that shape the Hungry Ghost Festival. At its centre is a monumental effigy constructed from paper and bamboo. It is made with great skill and care, presides over the festival, and is ultimately released through fire. I am drawn to the paradox of this form: something deliberately impermanent can sustain relationships with ancestors, wandering spirits and the unseen across generations. Rather than photograph only the scale and colour of the festival, I look for its quieter psychological and human dimensions. Offerings placed along street corners, temporary altars, prayer rituals, the labour of preparation and the effigy’s commanding gaze become anchors for grief, hope, duty and filial care. My approach combines observational street photography with intentional lighting, close framing, controlled blur and zoom-racking. These techniques allow the images to move between description and sensation. Sharp detail records the material and ritual specificity of the event, while unstable focus suggests the uncertain boundary between presence and absence, the living and the dead. The final burning is not simply destruction; it completes the ritual passage. Photography, however, holds onto what is meant to disappear. The series therefore considers both impermanence and preservation: how a temporary structure can carry enduring belief, and how a digital image may become an archive of something transformed into ash. Artist Biography Hong Hooi Liew, also known as Sean, is a Malaysian photographer based between Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Introduced to fine-art and commercial photography when he was young, he later developed a practice grounded in street photography and photojournalism. His work focuses on cultural and religious events, everyday encounters and the subtle gestures through which people express faith, connection and belonging. Attentive to atmosphere, movement and detail, he combines observational immediacy with expressive techniques such as controlled blur and zoom-racking. Through photography, he seeks to preserve culturally specific moments while recognising that traditions remain living, changing and inseparable from the communities that sustain them. Artist Links Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/photoculturetravelogue/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photoculturetravelogue The discussion of the 2027 British Pavilion draws upon the British Council’s announcement, “UK–Malaysia Team Selected for the British Pavilion at the 20th Venice Architecture Biennale,” published on 16 April 2026. https://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/about/press/uk-malaysia-team-selected-british-pavilion-20th-venice-architecture-biennale