Oobanken was made in Yangon, where Jerome Ming was living at the time, and it grows out of an early and lasting interest in built structures and small interventions. Ming does not set out to document the city. He constructs situations, assembling fragments of personal history, memory and imagination into scenes that he then photographs.

The rooms, courtyards and improvised enclosures that recur in the book read as an enclave or compound — spaces distinct in character from what surrounds them. Ming arrives at them through construction and performance, which leaves the purpose of an object and the meaning of an action unresolved. What holds the sequence together is a threshold: a steady awareness of whatever lies just beyond a self-imposed isolation.

That isolation has a setting. The photographs were made in a country then emerging from long separation, and the work carries the temper of the moment — a place once suspended in time, now in transition. The structures Ming pictures are provisional, and the book treats them with as much care as it gives the performances staged within them.

MACK published Oobanken in 2019: a hardback of 68 pages, 16.5 × 21 cm, with a silkscreen-printed bare board gatefold cover. The design keeps the object close to the plain, constructed character of its subject, and the modest scale suits a series built from small adjustments rather than spectacle. The book received MACK’s First Book Award in 2019.

For a collector, its claim is not scale but completeness of argument: a first book that already knows what it is doing with staging, sequence and the distance between viewer and built thing. Its concerns — provisional architecture, staged incident, the line drawn around a community — are ones photography has returned to often, and Ming’s handling of them is specific enough to reward slow reading rather than browsing.