What is your passion/ aspiration?

This was the main theme that drove the entire SHINE Youth Festival Media Conference in which I was invited by OMY Singapore to attend.
The SHINE Youth Festival is a festival featuring an exciting lineup of events and activities for the youths of Singapore. With events and activities, the festival encourage the ‘young at heart’ to showcase their talents and creativity to promote worthy causes and give back to the community at the same time.

The conference started off with dancers from Gleeful Moments as they grooved to the beat of disco tunes. Gleeful Moments are a show choir and coming from a choral background myself, I know how hard it is to keep a tune while moving. Let alone dance! I am always very amazed by show choirs as they not only have to sing, they have to dance and each person’s voice counts even more than ever. you get to wear different costumes for each show as well!

Next up was a panel discussion by Mr Martin Tan who is the chairman of the SHINE 2012 Steering Committee. I am probably one of those people who think that the current ‘strawberry’ generation are hopeless but Mr Tan actually said this:

If we give the young people a chance, I believe they will rise up to the occasion and surprise us.

With these words, I am going to introduce the Pledge to Shine portal.

Pledge to Shine

It is basically a website where you share your aspirations online and pledge how you are going to achieve it. Not exciting enough? Did I mention that you might win a Dell Alienware X51 desktop should you manage to force/ persuade/ hypnotize/ trick/ ask your friends to vote for your aspiration and you manage to score the highest amount of votes.

Next up are Dreamcatchers, one of my favorite Gold award project winners from Pitch to shine. Which is basically a grant to give youth related groups to pursue their interest and causes in which they believe in.
Dreamcatchers is an adolescent chronic illness peer group in which they use medical items and equipment to make art! Presented in a mix of photography and paintings, I got to speak to Alvina, a fantastic illustrator who suffers from a spinal disability.

Do not let your disability define you

These were her words to me and I really admire the fact that she is probably more athletic than I am >.>
The Dreamcatcher exhibition runs from the 27th to the 29th July 2012 at the Goodman Arts Center.

Dean!

Other performances include the Yoyo guys!
My lord. The yoyo takes me back to the time where I actually know yoyo tricks like round the world and walk the dog. Which is why it was really nostalgic when Dean, one of the yoyo gurus told me to try it out! Lets just say I’ll stick to photography but know this, he has been practicing the yoyo for 14 years and yoyos for competition purposes can cost up to 60SGD!!!

Last but not least, Luminance! This is a youth light art festival which will be held from 23rd of June to the 1st of July.
Here are some of the art work:

Made of Meji milk bottles!

Made from recycled wood!

And that about wraps up the entire media conference.
Truth be told, I am rather excited about his year’s festival. I was a participant back in 2008’s street festival where I did my final runway walk and had a blast then. Since the theme is about aspirations, mine would be to travel to London from Singapore without a single connecting flight before I hit 35(:

As Matthew Jordan Smith says, ‘Always, dream big.’

With Jiayi, Christina and Cookie!