50 Shades Of Love is a collection of fifty short stories by Anthea Indira Ong, presently a Nominated Member of Parliament in Singapore, the founder of the Hush TeaBarand also the co-founder of A Good Space.
As a metaphor for the short stories—each representing a year in Anthea’s life—that takes the readers on a journey of the peaks and troughs of her life experiences, the concept is centred on how the growth rings of a tree can be in order to find out the age of the tree by counting the number of rings and also the condition it survived in that year. With each story, she also introduces a tree, illustrated by hearing impaired artist, Lau Ee Wun.
Aesthetically, through the use of lightly varnished plywood, the silkscreen application of the cover design and the use of a off-white lightly textured paper, the overall design embraces the simplicity, raw and imperfection qualities understood in the concept of wabi sabi. This is also symbolic of the life journey that Anthea has shared where beauty can still be found and embraced in the imperfections of life.
