Eaden Huang

LONG SUMMER’S LOTUS

Photographer Eaden Huang is a man in a hurry — except when he’s waiting for that perfect moment, when the light and shadows of his subject are poised to change, the temperature to climb or dip, revealing a new landscape.

It might be a subject as close as the lotus pond in Whitman Mass., a private garden that he haunts every spring in order to court his lush subjects, lotus blossoms, in a moment of transition from early to later morning light. Or it might be a canyon in Arizona, or a sand dune in Death Valley.

I caught up with Huang at Monkey King Tea, a fragrant niche inside Malden’s Real Lucky Restaurant where his daughter Christina (who recently served as an account executive at artscope) served us tea and crepes as we talked and sipped and chewed.

Just over our heads paraded his “Long Summer’s Lotus” exhibition of a dozen portraits of lotuses clothed in light to bring out their most fleeting hues and compositions, recalling moments of human intimacy while never denying the botanical reality of this unique and venerated flower.

Huang, this man in a hurry, this man who courts stillness wherever it may be, talks of the quietness he experienced when he first exchanged his native Canton for his new home in Malden. Chinese urban sidewalks bustled with people, whereas Malden seemed, by comparison, almost empty.

James Foritano