It is a magazine that features real stories, personal reflections and epiphanies from people around the world. It believes that travel isn’t about fancy hotels or tourist destinations, but about immersing oneself in someplace entirely foreign to feel extremely uncomfortable so that one can learn from it. It believes that travel is a state of mind.
Founded by Nelson Ng from Singapore, annual magazine Lost has just published its sixth issue. Nelson used to jest that he’s a bedroom publisher, but this year he finally found a proper home for his six-year-old. The new studio is an old villa in the middle of Shanghai.
It all started six years ago from a semi-compulsory holiday where he decided to take a boat trip from Shanghai to Japan. It wasn’t a luxury cruise ship, but a simple cargo boat with limited recreation facilities and activities. There was not so much to do other than staring into the sea until everything began to wave. So he just picked up a pen and a notebook and wrote everything that came across his thought down. That was the first time he really felt that he travelled, on a cargo boat with no internet, no entertainment no nothing to do. Before that he always considered it boring to travel - usually with family, sightseeing, picture-taking, souvenir-buying. It’s definitely lack of something.
“I discovered travelling is not just an activity for your body. Where your body is going is irrelevant. What it counts is that you explore some new ideas inside you, that you didn’t know that you have,” said he, “you have a landscape inside you. You just need that sea, or a different place, you need that stimulation from something new, somewhere new, to be enlightened.” He started planning for a travel magazine right after he returned to Shanghai, where he was still working as the art director for a well-known creative agency. It took more than a year, from inviting contributions, editing, designing, to finally sending the magazine to the print factory. Being a Singaporean, Nelson has two native language: Chinese and English. Thus he decided that Lost should be a duo lingual magazine. But the work is also doubled, with double amount of pages, which also means double the cost.
The pilot issue of Lost has more than 300 pages, with stories from 14 different travellers and private photographs with different stiles. Egypt, Japan, Vietnam, Malaysia were among the destinations. It came 2 years after the boat trip to Japan, with a moderate print run of 500 copies. After that Lost gradually reached out, through indie cafés and book stores, through art book fairs and other independent medias, to more and more readers. Soon it found its own pulse and became an annual publication. Lost is yet another counterexample for the prophecy of the death of paper media. And honest independent paper magazines issued with love and sincerity will always survive the cruel competition of the fast-moving digital medias.
