SINCE WINNING an Oscar for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, costume designer and art director Tim Yip Kam-tim has branched out into new art forms.
Two new books, Blue and Illusion, are evidence of his talent for writing, photography and design. Yip's first two books, Flower of the Wind and Circulation, published in 2002 and 2003, were just as eclectic and also brought a design sensibility to prose. His writing is full of images, a strong sense of colour and vivid moods. But whereas the first two books focused on childhood reminiscence and coming-of-age experience, the new releases look at the metaphysical. Blue, the more personal of the two books, explores Yip's spiritual journey. 'This book is about depression,' he says in Taipei's Wind restaurant. 'It's dreamy. It's about the buried past. I use the process of writing to balance my emotions, my inner life.'
Dressed in his trademark black baseball cap, dark trousers and white linen Tang dress, Yip, 42, presents an easygoing counterpoint to his lavish, extravagant and outlandish art. After years of celebrity, he's taciturn, even shy. 'Some of [my writing] may not be that easy to understand. But they are my inner thoughts and reflection of me.'
'Blue covers the period of my last days in Taiwan and the past year in China shooting Chen Kaige's The Promise. I was in a moody phase. Many things weren't going smoothly at the time. It was a depression. I was sleeping two hours a day.'
Blue is an extravagantly designed, oversized book comprised of papers made of different materials and even fold-out pages that convey different moods. The predominant colour is blue: blue lighted streets, mountains, lawns and sky.
'Blue is the realm of imagination,' Yip writes. 'It's the colour of reality after [it's been] plastered by a coat of transparent colour. But sometimes, when you feel the colour blue, that is the original shape of the world's reality.'
In person, Yip can be just as poetic, abstract and philosophical. 'I grew up enamored by the Surrealism movement,' he says. 'That's a world with images existing in your mind rather than seen by your eyes. Except for the natural landscape, this world as we know it is all created by human beings. This world we know is created according to our dreams, fantasies and desires.'