A wau is a Malay kite, and in Kelantan it is closer to a piece of cabinetry than to a toy. Split bamboo, bent and bound, then layer on layer of cut paper laid over it in patterns that have names. Weeks of work, most of it done sitting down, for an object whose whole purpose is to be let go of.
Kelantan keeps two crafts of this kind going at once, and the trip took in both: the kites, and wayang kulit, the shadow-puppet theatre. The frame above is not a kite maker at all. It is a puppeteer, behind his screen, with the lamp on.
The tour was organised by the Photographic Society of Singapore, with William Chua leading it. The makers and the puppeteer are not named here.
The coast, first
The days started on the water and at the drying racks. Small fish laid out by the thousand, turned by hand, in flat early light that makes silver look like metal.
Photographing work of this kind, the temptation is always the wide shot that explains the scene. The frame that holds up is the pair of hands. Hands tell you how long someone has been doing something, which a wide shot never can.
The beach
Then the kites. A dozen in the air at once, tethered along the sand, all of them tugging in the same direction while the men who made them stand underneath watching the line rather than the kite.
A kite in the sky is a small object in a large amount of empty blue. The picture is not the kite. It is the man, the line, and the angle of his body against it — the kite only needs to be in the frame to explain what he is leaning away from.
Behind the screen
One lamp, a white screen, and everything else dark. Nothing about that room is convenient. It is also the best light of the trip, because it does the editing for you: what is lit is the work, and what is not lit does not exist.
The audience sits on the other side and sees only the shadow. From where I was, you get both at once — the puppet in the hand, painted and half in the light, and the silhouette it is throwing a few inches away.
Both crafts turn out to be the same proposition. Weeks of cutting, bending, pasting and painting, for an object that only exists properly in motion — a kite in the wind, a puppet against a lit screen — and which the audience never sees close up.
What a kite is for
You could ask why anybody spends three weeks on an object that a gust can fold in half. The makers did not seem to find the question interesting. The kite is not the point at which the work ends; the work ends when the thing is in the air and holding, and somebody standing on the sand can see, from a hundred metres below, whose kite it is.
The full Kelantan set is on SmugMug.