DOCUMENTING AS METHOD PHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA CURATOR: ZHUANG WUBIN This exhibition proposes a renewed focus on documenting as method in art making. Featuring works created from 1958 to the present moment, the 13 artists from Southeast Asia selected here approach documenting as method in three overlapping ways: documenting as looking and thinking; documenting as cataloguing; documenting as world-making. In parallel and diverging ways, they use photography as an embodied and embedded medium to experience realities or to create fantasies. MAIN EXHIBITION
Transcript
DOCUMENTING AS METHODPHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUTHEAST ASIACURATOR: ZHUANG WUBIN
This exhibition proposes a renewed focus on documenting as method in art making. Featuring works created from 1958 to the present moment,the 13 artists from Southeast Asia selected here approach documenting as method in three overlapping ways: documenting as looking and thinking; documenting as cataloguing; documenting as world-making.In parallel and diverging ways, they use photography as an embodied and embedded medium to experience realities or to create fantasies.
MAINEXHIBITION
ABOUT
Our understanding of photography in Southeast Asia is inflicted by the reductive binary of photography versus art, which morphs into the other binary of straight photographers versus artists who use photography. This is modernism’s last laugh, cultivating these binaries that have been inherited 1
by many art historians, curators and artists in the region. In Family Snaps: Photography in Southeast Asia, the previous exhibition that I curated for Chiang Mai City Arts & Cultural Centre on November 2014, I argue that it is more productive to think of photographic practices as embedded in the milieus that the practitioners operate, shaped by ideas and visuals that circulate locally and globally, and marked by personal desires and creative decisions. 2
Documenting as Method: Photography in Southeast Asia, which is curated for the inaugural edition of Chiang Mai Photo Festival 2015, operates from the same dialectic. It proposes a renewed focus on the process of documenting as a productive means to move beyond these reductive binaries, which have resulted in the amnesia of many practitioners from this region, at least since the 1950s. Ironically, it is not as though contemporary artists in Southeast Asia have stopped using documenting as one of their strategies in art making. While some are lauded for doing so, with their imaginative work rapidly canonised as contemporary art, others are castigated as mere photojournalists for mobilising the medium in similar ways. This double standard is reproduced through the reductive binaries and distracts us from more pertinent questions, including: how should a practitioner utilise the medium’s “still-powerful capacity to speak about events in the world without reproducing, in the infrastructure of one’s own work, the very political inequities one wants to contest”? While not all 3
practitioners strive to contest political inequities in their work, it is undeniable that photography continues to o er an egalitarian means to reflect upon our immediate environment. It is this sense of democracy that spooks art historians, curators and artists to perpetuate the reductive binaries.
Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, “Introduction: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art,” in The 1
Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (Berlin/New York: Sternberg Press/Center for Curatorial Studies, 2009), 12-13.
A digital version of the catalogue can be found at https://www.academia.edu/94172562
Geo rey Batchen, “Looking Askance,” in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Jay Prosser et al. (London: 3
Reaktion Books, 2012), 233.
By proposing Asia as method in cultural studies, theorist Chen Kuan-Hsing hopes that “societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity rebuilt”. Through the “constant inter-referencing and the dialectic of 4
comparison” amongst cultural workers in Asia, we may begin to develop 5
locally grounded understandings of history and culture, knowledge that makes no automatic claims on universalism. It is in this spirit of “constant 6
inter-referencing” my peers in Southeast Asia that I propose documenting as method. Here, I conceive documenting as an evolving and contested process that is not merely the dispassionate recording of reality. Instead, I wish to gesture towards documenting as an embedded and embodied process.
In the parallel and diverging ways in which they use photography in their practices, the work of the 13 artists featured here mark the possibilities of documenting as method. The selection features bodies of work made from 1958 to the present moment. In this text, I wish to tease out at least three overlapping ways to approach the idea of documenting as method, namely: documenting as looking and thinking, documenting as cataloguing, and documenting as world-making.
The first interpretation comes via a quote from Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana (b. 1980, Phnom Penh) who notes that documenting is the “repeat cycle of looking and thinking”. It is while shooting Walking Through 7
(2008-09), included in this exhibition, when Vandy first stumbled upon a bomb pond at the Kampong Cham countryside. The image haunted him, compelling his frantic reading into Cambodian history. He learnt that these craters resulted from the bombings that coincided with the American War in Vietnam, when America dropped over 2.7 million tons of bombs across Cambodia. The “repeat cycle of looking and thinking” about the mismanagement of Cambodia’s rubber resources in Walking Through triggers Vandy’s recuperation of his country’s historical scars in Bomb Ponds (2009), his most celebrated series thus far.
Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 4
Archaeology, ed. Erin Gleeson, Barbara Barsch and Ev Fischer (Berlin and Stuttgart: Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, 2013), 109.
A quick digression here: Writing about African photography, Okwui Enwezor characterises the shift from the modern to the contemporary as the evolution from depiction to observation, a shift from the dialectical to the analytical. I wonder if this shift is also the result of art workers in the 8
contemporary era finding more sophisticated words to contextualise photography. Certainly for the likes of Rong Wong-savun (1932-2009, b. Chai Nat, Thailand) and Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah (1907-79, b. Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia) featured in this exhibition, their documenting practices in the 50s and the 60s constitute embodied experiences of the milieus that they found themselves in. Their works are dialectical, as much as they are analytical.
The same can be said of the artistic practice of Chua Chye Teck (b. 1974, Singapore) who often notes the need to analyse his photographs in order to realise his concerns. Photography is not merely a recording tool but an enabling medium to make visible his concerns as a human being. We may 9
also approach the works of Chua and Shah featured here in relation to documenting as cataloguing. Chng Seok Tin (b. 1946, Singapore), on the other hand, often uses the camera to document her installations and to create source imageries for her printmaking work. In this show, she presents one of her contact prints, which resulted from her cataloguing of her Hand Sculpture Series (1978). Reading the work retrospectively, Chng feels that it captures the sense of emancipation in her move as an art student from a relatively conservative environment in Singapore to one of the centres of western modernism in UK. She parallels the archiving of her artworks, which no longer exist, with the documentation of performance art by performance artists. In the laborious process of documenting, defacing and re-surfacing 10
that informs Deadline (2011), Toh Hun Ping (b. 1978, Singapore) inscribes every single item in his possession, and then prints and bleaches the images, before re-scanning and sequencing the visuals into a one-hour video. The abridged version is presented here.
We may certainly extend Toh’s cataloguing into the idea of collecting. Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), for example, collects found photographs of female nightclub entertainers of the 1980s in Karma Karma Chameleons (2014- ) to recuperate the modernity of fashion that has always circulated between East Asia, Malaysia and the West. In Searching for Identity Series; Bottle #1 (2002-07), Po Po (b. 1957, Pathein, Myanmar)
Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (New York/Göttingen: 8
International Center of Photography/Steidl Publishers, 2006), 28.
Chua Chye Teck, interview by author, Singapore, December 23, 2014.9
Chng Seok Tin, interview by author, Singapore, December 31, 2014.10
extrapolates Cubism into photography. Po Po notes that an object’s identity has less to do with form. Instead, it is the di erent aspects of the object, which we readily recall in mind, that define its identity. In this work, the 11
process of collecting occurs during his meticulous documenting of the bottle at di erent angles, positions and time. In the case of Pramuan Burusphat (b. 1953, Bangkok, Thailand), he has been creating imageries of a self-referential nature since 1978, often using items that he has collected over the decades to visualise his personal life. I often think of Autobiographical Images (1978- ) as an attempt by Burusphat to re-imagine and re-live parts of his life through art making. His work, and that of Toh, converges with the idea of documenting as world-making.
There has always been a tendency to understand the act of photography as an imbalanced power relationship between the photographer and the helpless sitter. This is a position favoured by critics of photojournalism and writers dealing with issues of representation. However, since the 1980s, doubts on the authority of anthropological photographs have led to the re-evaluation of colonial and anthropological images, prompting us to reconsider them as collaborative events inflicted by the taste and expectations of the sitters. In her study on studio portraiture in Java, 12
Karen Strassler notes the preference of Indonesian customers in the 1950s for colour backdrops, even though it was only possible to produce black-and-white photographs then. Clearly, the experience of going to the studios to be photographed is as important as the outcome. These examples 13
suggest that we should consider the act of documenting as opening up an embodied, performative space for both the photographers and the sitters to project their desires. Hence, what appears to be a documentary series by Geric Cruz (b. 1985, Manila) in Second Star to the Right (2012-13) reveals itself to be an intense collaboration with two brothers at Zambales, Central Luzon, in which the photographer privileges the authenticity of the experience by incorporating the wish of his sitters throughout the documenting and editing process. In truth, Cruz shares the same sense of 14
vulnerability that Nguy n Qu c Thành (b. 1970, Hanoi) feels, vis-à-vis the soldiers whom he photographs in A Soldiers’ Garden (2012). Expressing their unease over the fame and heroism that sometimes accompany art practice and documentary work, both practitioners have been devising
Po Po, interview by author, Yangon, Myanmar, April 2008.11
Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 116.12
Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham and London: 13
Duke University Press, 2010), 88.
Geric Cruz, Skype interview by author, January 11, 2015.14
ways to temper with the relationship between the photographer and the sitter. However, as I have intimated, it is important not to conceive this power relationship in overly deterministic terms. A Soldiers’ Garden is as much a projection of Nguy n’s fantasies on these young soldiers as his sitters performing their adulthood for the camera. Nevertheless, it is their sense of uncertainty that drives Nguy n and Cruz to doubt and evolve their documenting practices, instead of doing what is more common in Southeast Asia amongst some of their peers, which is to uncritically replicate the aesthetic and ideatic templates valorised by Euramerican exhibitions and competitions.
In The War Within (2012), Noi Satirat Damampai (b. 1982, Hadyai, Thailand) approaches documenting as a method to create a dream-like encounter, which serves to evoke the state-of-mind of the photographer and the displaced Karen people whom she met along the Thai-Myanmar border. In CORPUS; Innermemories (2012-13), Deden Hendan Durahman (b. 1974, Majalaya, Indonesia) uses the analogue technique of multiple-exposure to collect memories of a particular woman. Through the documenting process, her body is fragmented into mnemonic landscapes. Both examples mark the other possibilities of documenting as world-making, shifting photography from the depiction of reality to the visualisation of thoughts and desires within the world of the artist’s work.
DOCUMENTING AS METHODPHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUTHEAST ASIACURATOR: ZHUANG WUBIN
Chng Seok Tin (b. 1946, Singapore) studied art in Singapore, UK, France and the USA from 1971 to 1985. Although she majored in printmaking, her artistic practice encompasses drawing, painting, collage, mixed media, textile, photography, ceramics, sculpture and installation. In 1988, due to brain abscess, she lost most of her eyesight. Since then, she has focused more on mixed media and sculptural work. Her practice addresses nature’s phenomena and the human condition. She has held 28 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 100 group shows in Singapore and abroad. In 2005, Chng was awarded the Cultural Medallion by the government of Singapore. She is also an accomplished writer and was given the Singapore Chinese Literary Award in 2007 by the Singapore Literature Society.
Contact Print for Hand Sculpture Series (1978)Chng Seok Tin (Singapore)
When I first moved to UK in 1975 to study art, I was really interested in modern art. It was quite different from what we had in Singapore. The work that I made then was informed by concepts and creative ideas in what we might call “conceptual art”. I think this development is natural. The move to UK opened my mind and I was trying to absorb everything regarding modern art. It was at times bewildering.
In Hand Sculpture Series, I use the motif of the hand to symbolise the artist’s hand. The hand is also important to human lives. I sculpted a hand and positioned it in such a way that it looked as though it jutted out of a box. I then placed different objects on the hand and presented the work as mixed media installation. Photography is used to record the work. Today, the photographs are the only trace of the work that survived.(Transcribed and edited by Zhuang Wubin from an interview with Chng Seok Tin on 31 December 2014 in Singapore)
Chua Chye Teck (b. 1974, Singapore) specialises in photography. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) in sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). Chua draws inspiration from everyday objects, recognising that their simple forms belie the historical and geographical significance that they encapsulate. His exhibition in 2008, New Castle was commissioned by the International Photographers and Researchers Network (IPRN), UK. In 2009 he was awarded a one-year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. In 2014, Chua was invited to participate in the Southeast Asia Platform of Art Stage, Singapore, where he showed a new direction in his photography, deconstructing elements in the environment into basic forms and shapes, and presenting the photographs in black-and-white format. He will be developing this further for an upcoming exhibition and book project due in 2016, for which he received Singapore’s National Arts Council Creation Grant.
Whilst returning to an area I used to spend time in as a teenager, it took me a moment to recollect my memory of the place, as it had changed drastically.
Located in northeastern Singapore, Punggol used to be a well-developed rural district where poultry, fish and vegetable farming thrived. It has been taken over by property business and is now being developed into a typical “satellite town”. The place was cleared and left empty for a period of time before development started.
This is a common experience people have whenever revisiting a place in Singapore. It is a country where constant change takes place, where the old is seldom valued unless it makes monetary sense.
During a visit to Punggol in 2006, I discovered the presence of small makeshift shelters. Each structure is marked by individuality and temporal existence, and I have been photographing them since.
These shelters do not belong to the homeless. People who spend time in the area, including fishing hobbyists, nature lovers and people seeking solitude, create these shelters. These shelters protect them from the sun, and offer refuge from the crowds and the concrete jungle.
Over time, I believe these structures will gradually disappear from our cultural and geographical landscape, which is marked by the pursuit of uniformity and commercialisation. Paradise pays tribute to these remaining structures of individualism. (Written by Chua Chye Teck, 2011)
Paradise (2006- )Chua Chye Teck (Singapore)
Deden Hendan Durahman (b. 1974, Majalaya) received his BFA at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in 1997. In 2005, he obtained a Diploma in Fine Art from the Braunschweig University of Art in Germany, before graduating with a Meisterschüler from the same institution in 2006. Since then, Durahman has returned to Indonesia to work as an artist, designer and photographer. As a lecturer at the Faculty of Art and Design, ITB, he and his colleagues have founded the intermedia studio under the Visual Art Study Program.
Durahman’s work can be found in the collections of various public institutions, including the Tama Art Museum in Tokyo and the Print Room of the Art and History Museum in Geneva. His work has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Indonesia, Germany, South Korea, Belgium, China, Switzerland, Japan, Malaysia, Bulgaria and Singapore, amongst others.
CORPUS features different bodies of work. As a whole, it is an exploration of forms concerning the intricacies of human and non-human corpuses. By emphasising aesthetics, forms are created that exist between the real and the unreal. I create imageries that encourage the viewers to make personal associations.
How do we identify someone or something? How do we construct or re-construct the existence of a landscape? Our mental process can sometimes result in imageries that are quite different from factual reality. It is our imagination that fabricates the corpus as a universe of its own.
Geric Benedicto Cruz (b. 1985, Manila) is a freelance photographer / videographer based in Manila. In 2011, he was one of the winners of the ASEAN-Korea Multimedia Competition in Seoul for his personal work, Where I End and You Begin. In 2012, Cruz was chosen to participate in the artist-in-residence program sponsored by the Casa San Miguel Foundation at San Antonio, Zambales. Second Star to the Right, the work that he made during the residency, was exhibited in 2013 at the Delhi Photo Festival, India.
They are brothers, sleeping under a purple sky pricked with firefly stars. Sometimes they go hunting, peering into wells for monsters, diving for mermaids, waiting hours for the last brown spider. Where one boy goes, another follows.
This is the story before the sun sets, before one boy goes and leaves the other behind. Their names are maybe Denver, maybe Karlo. Their names do not matter. They are anyone who ever had a brother, who found out alone that fireflies die and mermaids never lived.
These are memories, a gift from one brother to another, for every child who ever found the key to fairyland, and every man who tried to find his way back.(Written by Patricia Evangelista)
Second Star to the Right (2012-13)Geric Cruz (The Philippines)
Based in George Town, Penang, Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Kuala Lumpur) completed his BA photography at the London College of Communication and has exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Cologne, London and Seoul. His practice involves investigating the process of cultural translation. Hoo is interestedin examining the residues of this process in which attempts to translate or assimilate has been made, resulting at times an unexpected and incoherent outcome. He is the founder and one of the members of the artist collective, Run Amok Gallery at George Town.
Karma Karma Chameleons features a series of found photographs of female nightclub entertainers of the 1980s who sported perm hairstyles, and flamboyant costumes covered in feathers and sequins. These collected prints are then digitised and restored with the ladies’ facial features obscured.
Together they provide a glimpse into the glamour portrait practice of that era. They were often shot from a levelled and head-on angle; the sitter would appear demure or, occasionally, in more engaging poses. The subjects drew reference from pop idols from Hong Kong, Taiwan or the West, and then created their own appropriated versions of archetypal beauty.
This project looks at how photography (studio techniques and physical prints) is used as a self-promotional tool, or as an extension of self-representation in the form of idol cards and fan photos. I am interested in the hierarchy of taste structuring the notion of beauty in both mainstream and sub-cultures; how these antithetical yet symbiotic relationships hinge on one another to sustain themselves. (Written by Hoo Fan Chon)
Karma Karma Chameleons (2014- )Hoo Fan Chon (Malaysia)
Nguyễn Quốc Thành (b. 1970, Hanoi) is the founding director of QUEER FOREVER!, the queer art festival in Hanoi in 2013. He is also a founding member of Nhà Sàn Collective, Vietnam. In 2012, Nguyễn mounted his first solo show, A Soldiers’ Garden at Japan Foundation, Hanoi.
As a photographer, I am interested in portraying men who live with one another in the same place over a period of time. In my work, I question the boundaries between homosocial and homosexual desires.
Usually off limits to civilians, I am granted special permission from army authorities to take photographs of a battalion outside Hanoi on November 2012, where new recruits are assembled for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are relocated to the assigned battalion. They are mostly young men between 18 and 19 years old, the majority of them coming from provinces rather than the capital Hanoi. These young men are transported out of home and given a new life, subjected to the control of army officers. They are in transition in many ways—between home and the army camp, between the life of a young person and that of a soldier, between a life dependent on family and one with responsibilities for others.
I am interested in how they negotiate with the military institution. Portraiture is familiar yet formal, and serves as a frame for the subject’s self-expression. The work results from a mixture of chance and necessity. Night—a space of desire, intimacy, fear, safety—is the only time I can make portraits of the soldiers without them being too distracted. As usual,I ask them “to be themselves”, but also to pose with close friends or friends from their hometown. Apparently, this runs counter to the orders from officers who watched from the side, to ensure that the soldiers pose in a serious manner.
This series is created in a space called the soldiers’garden, slightly separate from the training area but relatively near to an officers’ building where electricity to light the portraits is available. While some viewers may be drawn to the fresh faces of young soldiers, the images hint at distances—between the subjects, between the image and the viewer, between darkness and light.
Later, I am told that in army bases, soldiers often come to the gardens at night to talk and socialise, and to be heard and seen without fear. (Written by Nguyễn Quốc Thành)
A Soldiers’ Garden (2012)Nguyễn Quốc Thành (Vietnam)
Noi Satirat Damampai (b. 1982, Hadyai, Thailand) holds a Bachelor degree in Economics from Thammasat University, Bangkok. Since 2005, she has worked as a journalist and photographer for various English-language publications in Southeast Asia. More recently, Damampai has tried to explore the boundaries between art, documentary photography and creative writing in her work.
Recent exhibitions: The War Within, Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo, Japan (2014); The War Within, Asian Women Photographers’ Showcase, Obscura Festival, Penang, Malaysia (2014); Mae Ying, PhotoPhnomPenh, Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2013); Mae Ying, The Reminders Project for World Event Young Artists, Wallner Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, UK (2012).
Walking up the mountain in a dark tropical jungle, decayed grey skulls and human corpses were scattered in sight along the narrow trails.
I did not fear in that spell of total darkness. They did not harm me - the Spirits of the jungle just let me pass through into their mysterious territory. They were the ghosts who sacrificed their lives over more than 60 years of fighting. I continued walking, even though I really had no idea of where the road would possibly lead me.
“Just keep walking,” they were whispering.
And finally, there I was, at the border of the faded dream and stark reality. It is the War Within - the war within my dream, the war within their land, and the war within their minds.
#In conversations with and memories of the victims from the world’s longest civil war: the struggle of the Karen ethnic people for their homeland, currently located at Karen state, Myanmar. (Written by Noi Satirat Damampai)
The War Within (2012)Noi Satirat Damampai (Thailand)
Po Po (b. 1957, Pathein) is one of Myanmar’s leading contemporary artists. He is considered a pioneer in each of the fields that he has worked in, namely installation, performance and photography.
Selected exhibitions: If the World Changed, 4th Singapore Biennale, 2013; Re-Connect: Contemporary Photography from Myanmar, Esplanade Jendela, Singapore, 2013;Freedom in Blossom! Gangaw Village and Experimental Art in 1980s Burma, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, 2012-13; NordArt 2012, Kunstwerk Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf, Germany; Burmese Arts Festival, Free Word Centre, London, 2010; Emerging Wave: ASEAN-Korea Contemporary Photo Exhibition 2010, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, and GoEun Museum of Photography, Busan, South Korea; plAy: Art from Myanmar Today, Osage Gallery, Singapore, 2010; Unreal Asia, 55th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany, 2009; Liberation, Saigon Open City, Vietnam, 2007; Spaces and Shadows: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany, 2005; Art Circus, Yokohama Triennale, Japan, 2005; 3rd Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2000; 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan, 1999; Solidconcepts, Judson Church Center, Yangon, Myanmar, 1997; Untitled, Myanmar Artistic Association Center, Yangon, 1987.
When people say, “This is a cup” or “This is a bottle”, they identify them not based on form, but based on the different memories / facts of each object. Perhaps we have collected many aspects of each object (its “identity”) in our minds.
I try to make photographs that represent objects not only in three-dimension, but also to collapse the dimension of time into the work.
Working with an everyday object, I move around to take photos of it. I am like the audience who walk around to view an art object. In other words, I also try to capturethe different times when I stop in front of the object.
These photographs are not images of objects. They are objects of the mind.
Instead of working digitally, I make these photos manually using the multiple exposure technique, exposing each negative frame four to eight times.(Written by Po Po)
Searching for Identity Series; Bottle #1 (2002-07)Po Po (Myanmar)
Pramuan Burusphat (b. 1953, Bangkok) is an artist specialising in photography and photo-based media. He received his BFA (1976) and MFA (1979) in visual arts from North Texas State University (presently, Universityof North Texas). In 1980, he started teaching at Srinakarinwirot University, Bangkok. Two years later, he joined Chulalongkorn University (CU) where he became one of the founding members of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts in 1982. In 1983, Burusphat started the very first Photography as Art programme in Thailand at CU. In 1994, he resigned from CU and in 1998, he settled down permanently in New Zealand.
Since 1977, Burusphat has had eight one-man shows, including one at the National Gallery, two at the British Council Gallery in Bangkok, and one at the Los Angeles Photography Centre, California. He has participated in more than 65 group exhibitions in New Zealand, Thailand, Southeast Asia, Italy, Germany and the United States.
My interest in photography started in the fall of 1976. I made a series of still-life images, portraits and self-portraits. These photographs are important because they convinced me that photography is the right medium for my self-expression. During my photographic studies, I had gone through many phases of image making—from straight photography to photo narratives to minimalist / structuralist work.
In 1978, I started making images of an autobiographical nature. According to Webster's dictionary, autobiography refers to the story of one’s life written by himself or herself. By implication, autobiographical images refer to visuals that tell the story of one’s life as composed by oneself.
I will like to quote artist Duane Michals whose photographs and writing have contributed to my interest in creating autobiographical images:
(Written by Pramuan Burusphat)
When you look at my photographs, you are looking at my thoughts.
I am very attached to the person of Stefan Michals. He is the man I never became. We are complete opposites, although we were born at the same moment. If we should meet, we would explode. We are like matter and anti-matter. He is my shadow. I saved myself from him.
I only photograph what I know about, my life. I do not presume to know what blacks are or what they feel or bored suburban families or transvestites. And I never believe photographs of them staring into a camera.
I take nothing for granted. I can count on nothing. I am not sure where I once was certain. I don't know what will be left by the time I'm fifty. That's ok.
Autobiographical Images (1978- )Pramuan Burusphat
(Thailand / New Zealand)
Honoured as National Artist in Literature in 1995, Rong Wong-savun (1932–2009, b. Chai Nat) began professional life as a photographer.Despite working professionally only from 1954 to 1964, Rong managedto stand out from his contemporaries with his unique perspective of the world, the same gift that later earned him the accolade of the ‘Eagle of the Literary Garden’ for his inventive use of Thai and English words in his writings.
His photographic series of the Rama I Bridge, shot in 1958, still looks fresh and new to us today. His experimental camera angles—very low shots taken from ground level—tore up the books on compositional rules of that era.(Written by Manit Sriwanichpoom)
Rama I Bridge (1958)Rong Wong-savun (Thailand)
Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah (1907-79, b. Kuala Terengganu) was an accomplished amateur photographer who was at the forefront of the development of modern Malayan photography. In 1958, he became the first Malay to become an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society in the UK. For over a quarter century, he was the patron and driving force of the Photographic Society of Malaysia. He was also made an honorary lifetime member of the Singapore Photographic Society.
Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah was the 14th sultan of Terengganu (1946-79) and the 4th king of Malaysia (1965-70).
When Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah served as the king of Malaysia from 1965 to 1970, the race riots of 13 May 1969 broke out in Kuala Lumpur (KL). On 15 May, a day after he signed the curfew to keep everyone at home, the sultan went out under heavy security with a small entourage and took pictures of the vacated streets in KL from his own carefully chosen vantage points.
This is the sultan’s most political work, setting it apart from the images of his peers from the camera clubs. There is a sense of eeriness in these scenes of emptied streets, with the signs of violence almost non-existent in his photographs. But our impression of how bustling KL normally is punctures this illusion of tranquillity. Here, we sense the anguish of the sultan, pleading for a swift return to the social contract of multiculturalism. (Written by Zhuang Wubin)
Kuala Lumpur Kept at Home (1969)Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah (Malaysia)
Toh Hun Ping (b. 1978, Singapore) is a video artist, writer and former art lecturer. His video works have been screened at international experimental film festivals (Paris Festival of Different and Experimental Cinema) and are presented in art venues both as video installations and live-performance projections (Sculpture Square and Substation, Singapore). In preparation for his next video work, Toh is researching into the history of film production in Singapore. He is now blogging at sgfilmlocations.com and sgfilmhunter.wordpress.com, websites about film locations in Singapore.
I began to take photographs of all my possessions when I was informed that I had to relocate. The photographs are bleached and combined/sequenced with text and other related visuals into a one-hour video piece, Deadline.
This is an abridged version, dedicated to a girl whom I have not shared everything with.(Written by Toh Hun Ping)
Deadline (2011)Toh Hun Ping (Singapore)
Vandy Rattana (b. 1980, Phnom Penh) began photographing with a concern over the lack of documentation of personal stories, traits and unofficial monuments of his culture. His early works straddled the line between strict photojournalism and conceptual practice, and displayed a preoccupation with the everyday as experienced by the average Cambodian. More recently, his work critiques historiography by pivoting towards fiction.
Vandy’s recent solo exhibitions include Enter the Stream at the Turn, CAPC, Bordeaux, France (2014) and Bomb Ponds, Asia Society, NYC, USA (2013). Recent group exhibitions include The Khmer Rouge and the consequences. Documentation as artistic memory work, Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin, Germany (2015), In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis, USA (2014), and No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, Asia Society, Hong Kong (2013).
Walking Through addresses the mismanagement of Cambodia’s rubber resources with beautiful, almost cinematic shots of one such plantation at Kampong Cham. At the plantation, overwhelmed by his country’s physical wealth, Vandy felt a sense of calm. However, the feeling is incongruent with his knowledge that the plantation’s revenue has been siphoned away from the workers. Vandy cloaks his helplessness in these deceptively reassuring photographs, perhaps hoping that the beauty of his photographs can trigger the questions of accountability among the Cambodian audience.(Written by Zhuang Wubin)
Walking Through (2008-09)Vandy Rattana (Cambodia / Taipei)
