Exhibition Review: “Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry”

Artist Donna Chiu; Curator Zhuang Wubin

Imagine yourself, sitting by the window while looking at a painting to dry. Time passes without the ability to know when the paint dries. The mood of helplessness and the feeling of passivity mirror artist Donna Chiu and her family’s diasporic journeys – the highlight of her solo exhibition at Lumenvisum, “Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry”.

Image courtesy of Zhuang Wubin

As you walk into the exhibition space, there is a gloomy and melancholy atmosphere. The works are mostly muted in colour and scattered in different corners of the space. They are often grouped in pairs as if they are landscapes that we passively see through a pair of glass windows. Next to the pair of old school tables and chairs, there is a pair of black and white, light and shadow abstract images. Donna mentioned that these images were taken during her home quarantine when she tested COVID positive. Side by side, the two images evoke a sense of “waiting for time to pass”, depicting nothing more than the shadows and light passing through the window blinds at different times of the day.

Image courtesy of Lumenvisum

Next to it is another pair of images. The image on the left is a blown-up black-and-white image of what looks like a “finger crossed” hand gesture. The image on the right is a stacked image of two identical images of what I presume is a body part. The top image is printed on matt paper and is torn with half remaining, while the full image underneath is printed on semi-gloss paper. The combination of these images as if indicating to me that no matter how fragmented the diasporic journeys are, there is hope that they will be okay. Other than photographic works, on the opposite ends of the space sits a pair of paintings. Her choice of colour paint and her repeating brushstrokes create a sense of heaviness. This tone connects with the rest of her photographic works and lingers throughout the space.

Image by Michelle Chan

I found myself slowing down when experiencing her works as if time became stagnant for layers of emotions to build up and then disperse. Perhaps it is the passivity of these abstract images that allowed me to pay more attention to the curatorial details and installation choices. There are a lot of textures involved. Almost all sets of image pairings use different types of paper and mounting. An image from the observatory is printed on foam board while others are printed on photographic paper. The photocollage and the Instax works are framed while others are nailed on the wall. Some works are mounted with big rustic nails, while others use round magnets. The “finger crossed” hand gesture image is only mounted at the top creating a curl-in bottom. With light effects, the shadow of the print introduces volume to a static image. I am unsure who decided these details, whether it is Donna, the artist, or Wubin, the curator. Perhaps the idea is translated from the layering and texturing in the artist’s collage works and paintings. Either way, the mix of different printing materials and installation methods adds a layer of materiality. It can enhance the audience’s experience of the artist’s expression of her diasporic journeys. 

For me, the most interesting part of the exhibition is the juxtaposition of the bookmarked pages from “a class-book of PSLE HISTORY for singapore primary six”, the text by Lee Kuan Yew, and Donna’s photographic work.

Some bookmarked pages from a Singapore Primary 6 class-book; Images by Michelle Chan

The textbook is for children under 12 years old. The pages clearly indicate that there was national education on the history of China and Hong Kong in Singapore back in the seventies. Children of the nation would learn simplified facts of Hong Kong’s or China’s history, such as “Hong Kong has been ruled by Britain since 1842” and “The Chinese Revolution started in Wuchang on 10th October 1911. The Chinese called it the Double Tenth Revolution”. At the opposite end of the exhibition space displays a loosely installed piece of paper, with a text by the prime minister then, Lee Kuan Yew, on 16 August 1959. It writes:

“But I suggest to you that the English-speaking students who will emerge in 10 or 20 years time from the English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil schools will be completely different – a completely different person from the English-educated persons of the past. They will not be deculturalised or devitalised. They will have vitality and confidence and a sense of dedication to our own country and our own people.”

This text is in fact an extract from the Singapore Government Press Statement released on the same day. It was part of the speech for Radio Singapore with the topic “The English-educated and the future”. The combination of the 3 pieces (the class books, the text by Lee Kuan Yew and Donna’s artistic works) makes me think about the national identity of Singapore. How is a sense of belonging to a place called “home” created in a national scale? And then, considering the artist Donna, a Singaporean citizen who has had several diasporic journeys, is not the product of the Singaporean school that educated the nation with common values and ideals. What would her experiences be and what feelings would she have?

The exhibition demonstrates the layers of inner conflicts and anxieties of the artist and her family’s diasporic journeys in multi-dimensional ways – from the artistic works themselves to installation choices and materials that reflect the political environment at that time.

Catch the exhibition before it ends.

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Photography in Southeast Asia IV: 
Donna Chiu – Sitting by the Window, Looking at the Painting Dry 

Date: 31.03 – 30.04.2023
Location: Lumenvisum, L2-02, JCCAC, 30 Pak Tin Street, Shek Kip Mei
Time: 11-1; 2-6pm Tues to Sun

On interracial families and identity formation

A review on the exhibition: m<other> by Kim Jee-Yun

While the research on ‘tracking Hong Kong visual traits’ is still on-going, I came across this exhibition m<other> by a Korean artist Kim Jee-Yun. The work on interracial families and the question on ethnic identity formation for the offsprings felt somewhat related to the fate and background of Hong Kong, a city of an intersection between the West and the East.

As I walked into Soluna Fine Art Gallery located in Sai Street, Sheung Wan, on the right there was a family portrait of Alia Eryes, the current CEO of Mother’s Choice, and her mother. And to the left by the stairs, it was the artist statement written by Dr. Vicky Lee, who wrote a book on Being Euasian: Memories Across Racial Divides. The tone sets in to focusing on mothers and femininity immediately, mirroring the theme of the exhibition. What drew my attention was the book shelf beside the artist statement. There were two archival images of Euasian family portraits in Hong Kong taken in 1900 and 1924 alongside Dr. Lee’s book. It gave me more context into thinking about the history of Eurasian community and how it all began in Hong Kong.

© Michelle Chan @ Soluna Fine Art Gallery

Little Edith Eaton says to herself, ‘Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? … I believe that some day a great part of the world will be Eurasian. I cheer myself with the thought that I am but a pioneer. A pioneer should glory in suffering.’

(Sui Sin Far [Edith Eaton] , ‘Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian’, 222) – Extracted from Chapter 2 of the book ‘Being Eurasian: Memories Across Racial Divides’. https://hkupress.hku.hk/image/catalog/pdf-preview/9789622096714.pdf

From the artist statement, it felt that the artist was more interested in the mothers, and their visibility and presence needed to be acknowledged more so than the fathers within the interracial families. I wondered, why not the fathers? Lee wrote in her book that, “Any European employee who violated the colonial etiquette by interracial romance was jeopardizing not only his career but was also risking ostracism…Kenneth Andrew recalled that the first document he had to sign was a promise not to marry a Chinese female (Langford, 1998)”. It feels as though the hostility of interracial marriage is mutual between mothers and fathers, so I wonder whether there was something else that the artist felt with mothers that needed to be acknowledged.

Looking at the images, the images of the mothers and their child often took place on the bed, or sofa or a corner of their home. Lying down, sitting or standing, they were stoic with seriousness or slight grin on their faces. Perhaps it carried on from the idea of traditional painting where wider smiles were “associated with madness, lewdness, loudness, drunkenness, all sorts of states of being that were not particularly decorous”. Or perhaps the artist wanted the images to represent power and seriousness of these interracial families. Serendipitously, I met the artist on the day of visit. She told me her photographic process, “I asked them to find a place that is comfortable. For example, for a baby it would make sense to have the 2 hours photography session on the bed. I asked them not to smile, because this is documentary photography. During the shooting, I show them the photographs I took. The camera is a mirror to show them how they want to be represented. They changed their pose to adopt to that and we agree together on the final image.” The work became interesting in that it is a collaboration with the interracial families in creating a pictorial representation of how they want to be seen. And then what fascinates me is when the family being photographed have the power to control how they are being represented in images, their choices of poses can also infer how they want others to see them. The power of their presence becomes not only being who they are in front of the camera, but also how they want to be seen by others.  

From the clothing that the mothers wore, the objects, and surrounding environment in these portraits, all the works presented in this exhibition reflected social-economic privilege in the interracial families photographed. The artist mentioned to me that the choice of families are those amongst her network – friends, neighbours. Slowly she advertised on social media recruiting mix-raced families who want to be photographed. How is her method of selecting families to photograph affect the way audience understand and learn about the psychological and emotional depth of interracial families in Hong Kong?  Perhaps this is something to explore further too.

© Michelle Chan @ Soluna Fine Art Gallery

Amongst the photographs, one photograph of an Indonesian mother with her baby boy drew my attention. According to the gallerist, she was often mis-represented as the domestic helper. I wonder how her interracial marriage experience is in comparison with the others, especially in relation to the culture of this city Hong Kong. It was a shame that the exhibition only presented the images of family portraits. I felt the exhibition would have been more enriching if sound recordings of interviews about the families’ experiences of interraciality were included. I felt this would have given more layers to the body of work and to the theme that the artist wanted the viewers to ponder upon.

Honest Photography: how to photograph with a free mind

Part 1. Kosuke Okahara on photographing with a free mind

“If there’s a pure form of documentary photography, the picture should not be influenced by any preexisting visions.”

Having been working on a story about the impact of drugs on local community in various parts of Columbia for 13 years, Kosuke Okahara became able to predict the kind of scenes that he would see even though he was in different towns, and in the way he would frame the images.

“It’s like I was trying to see what I’ve seen already… it’s almost like I’m copying myself…”

“I asked myself – am I documenting or am I just taking pictures of the situation that I kind of wanted to see… ” he quoted. 

A former aspiring Olympic skier whom became a W. Eugene Smith Fellowship recipient, Japanese photographer Kosuke Okahara shared his struggle with the philosophical dilemma he had with documentary photography, and his journey to finding his ways through making the work The Blue Affair. 

© Kosuke Okahara, from the photobook ‘The Blue Affair’; Source @ Kosuke Okahara Website

The Blue Affair is a a work with photographs taken in Koza, the heart of Okinawa, which gave Okahara the refreshing sense of being a photographer with a beginner’s mind again. The repeated visits without a specific purpose in producing a story somehow led to the people, the conversations, the happenings he encountered from this place infiltrating his dreams — as if these were symbolic gestures in nudging him to return, and at the same time, to relight his inner flame and re-experience again the joy of just pure photography.   

“… being more conscious takes one away from the purpose while getting ride of the purpose is the only way to get closer to the intent. In that sense, documentary is like a tragedy of fate. Achieving by losing – like a Shakepearean play.” —extract from the afterword written by Tatsuya Ishikawa, of the photo book The Blue Affair by Kosuke Okahara. 

Are we really creating images from a fresh eye every time we shoot, or are we already building on from pre-existing images of what to be seen? How can we be more aware when the way we photograph becomes purposeful rather than being open and honest with what is there to be seen? And how can we remove ourselves from the position of already knowing and begin again with a beginner’s mind? These are the questions to ponder, and with the blue affair, Okahara has shown us that it is possible.

Going through The Blue Affair book gave me chills. It’s the kind of book that gives you a visual journey in a way that you are drawn in as if you were present with the photographer, experiencing what he was experiencing at the same time. That’s the kind of work I aspire to work towards, because the work that one would remember the most, are the ones that are felt.

His recommended Photobook:  Rasen Kaigan by Leiko Shiga

Please check out his work:

Website: https://www.kosukeokahara.com / IG: @kosukeokahara

To be continued… Part 2. Teju Cole on embracing chance in a confined time

Hello! How are you? — A Photo Exhibition by So Hing Keung

If I am to be completely honest, writing has been with my life even more so than photography. Since I remember I kept a diary close to me and it’s been something that I make sure I do every morning til this day. There’s always been this little voice inside my head that says I should write more but also not really knowing what it is that I should write. So I started and I stopped. I wrote a bit of this and that, and then I stopped again. This cycle repeated endlessly. The creative resistance is huge. Not good enough writing. Not good enough topic. Not interesting enough. Not genuine enough. Etcetera etcetera. I have struggles to make myself sit and sift through my thoughts to come to something that I feel is “presentable”. But maybe that’s the very idea that is blocking me. 

I once read a letter of Vincent Van Gough to his brother, Theo, from October 2 1884, he wrote,

“You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerises some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.

Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of “you can’t.”

So this whispering voice is coming back to me again. And this time I’m determined to break this spell of “you can’t” and just write. Like Picasso would say, “you have to start painting to know what you want to paint.” A blank page is a scary thing to a writer, it is different to photography where one picks something from the world and frame it. One has to clearly organise their thoughts so to articulate exactly what they want to communicate. So here I am again, starring at this blank page and my fingers started to type, and then holding the delete button and retype again. Something beautiful came about from this act of back and forth, and then words start to imprint themselves onto this blank page forming sentences and paragraphs. Maybe all I really needed to get pass was the very first 15 minutes of panic, and just let myself sit through this uncomfortable space of the unknown. 

© Lumenvism, from the series ‘Hello! How Are You?’; Source @ JCCAC Happenings

Yesterday I went to the exhibition opening “Hello! How are you? — A Photo Exhibition by So Hing Keung” at Lumenvisum Hong Kong. I noticed that usually art reviews or exhibitions go-to articles are mostly written in Chinese (because after all it’s mostly for the local audience) but honestly, I’m just way more comfortable with writing in English. (Perhaps this can be useful for those outside of Hong Kong to know more about Hong Kong art and artist.)

I once did a workshop with So Hing Keung and his work is very much influenced by Josef Sudek. A lot So’s previous work, even the work at this particular exhibition, are mainly photographs of still life and rarely does he photograph people. His interest in photographing traces in our ordinary life draws our attention to the little things that we may overlook daily. In this particular work, he drew his attention to his shadow (which he refers to as death) and its relationship with objects and the surrounding environment. Playing by the idea of how photographers usually avoid shooting shadows, he purposefully investigated this relationship to question and document his existence. 

Further by displaying these photographs of the shadows in an exhibition format, it has an after effect of creating an illusion of “saying hello” and inviting the audience to join in the conversation with his shadows in co-creating our existence wit those photographs. On one of the walls, there are 4 large panels of work with one that looks like Lo Ting, a species half-human half-fish, indigenous to Hong Kong, as the poster of the exhibition. He referred these panels as “death rolls” and hence the looseness of the mount. The rest of the work were displayed in an organised home deco style of 15-20 thick white frames along the other three white walls. The frames were small and glassless, allowing the audience to look closely, like peaking through different windows, to speak to these strange aliens that never come to light. 

The work has a certain subtlety yet with a quick glance it can easily be interpreted as gimmicky and literal. Especially with the limited gestures (often with a hand wave) and rigid body postures of how the artist interacted with his shadows, I feel the work can be expanded much more if given the range of diversity to play. I guess this work comes with resonance to the previous days of working from home, social distancing and lockdowns where one would begin to ask deep questions about our very own existence, especially when we cannot relate to the physical world. Our shadows become the very fundamental thing that brings us back to our sense of placement in this world. Here, So recreated this journey for the audience to experience how we can reconnect with ourselves and the world.

In conversation with Mien Thuy

How do we define ourselves? And what makes us who we are as individuals and as a collective? Thuy is a Vietnamese self-taught photographer who is interested in using photography as a tool to navigate and explore her identity and her Vietnamese roots.

The image of her hands, using both her middle fingers and the ring fingers, stretching her eyes into 2 thin lines making a strange face in front of a mirror captivated me. I even tried it myself — the muscles around the eyes were stretched outside of their comfortable placements, feeling strange and unpleasant yet present. What intrigued me the most was her self-portrait in front of a mirror ironically puts her in a place of wanting this strangeness to be seen yet one cannot even see herself.

As a new member joining badeyesphotos, Thuy is joining me in a long deep conversation about how photography came into her life, her works and the process behind them and life in general. Hello Thuy! Thanks for joining me and discussing with you about your photography journey.

© Mien Thuy, from the series ‘Sisyphus’s sleepwalking’; Source @ Mien Thuy Website

When I was studying Thuy’s work for the interview, I could easily resonate with her emotional rides as a female photographer myself working in Asia as well. Our identity is constantly changing and shaping from our own changing body, our family influences and to the nation’s political and cultural impacts. Here Thuy is not afraid to speak and stand up for what she believes in, despite the world trying to categorise herself into labels of this or that, she used photography to express her struggle yet at the same time stood a unique point of view of expressing who she is as a photographer.

Her recommended Photobook: Jesús Monterde — Nemini Parco

Please check out her work:

Website: https://mienthuytran.com / IG: @may.ushuaia

Evidence – Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel

Larry Sultan, famously known for his work Picture from Home, which documents the lives of his home with parents in Southern California with contemporary photography, film stills, fragments of conversations and his own writings and other memorabilia, collaborated with Mike Mandel for a work less well-known Evidence, a brilliant recent discovery while reading the book Photography and Collaboration by Daniel Palmer.

Between 1975-1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel worked together and curated selected photographs from a multitude of images that previously existed solely within the boundaries of the industrial, scientific, governmental and other institutional sources. The work Evidence is about juxtaposing these previously contextualised images into new forms of narratives which some become humorous and while others perplexing. The work demonstrate that the meaning of a photograph is conditioned by the context and sequence in which it is seen, and by isolating from their original context that these images take on meanings that address the confluence of industry and corporate mischief, ingenuity and pseudo-science.

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© Larry Sultan, from the series ‘Evidence’; Source @ Larry Sultan

One needs to read the book to fully absorb and comprehend what they set out to do (And I wish I have the book to read it closely too!). The absurdity of these pairings somehow has a common thread that holds the whole book, transporting you to a universe that you may be familiar with yet completely off in some way – suggesting that we often read images in a contextualised form and when that’s been removed, what seems familiar becomes floating in a space that is waiting for us to make meaning of. When there’s a series of these and are carefully curated and sequenced, our brain has its way to fill in those blanks and create new forms of narrative. Evidently these are images of evidence, of truths, of events, of history… somehow in Evidence the value of these images changed and became fictional.

Two People – Sean Lee

Photography can of course be about documenting what’s in front of us, the pslit moment that happened right in front of our eyes, but it can also serve as a medium to create spaces for conversations, for connections for intimacy.

Two people is an ongoing body of photographic work by Singapore photographer Sean Lee as part of his artistic oeuvre exploring the theme of family and kinship in an Asian context. Lee used photography as a device for breaking the silence in understanding his family better. The number ‘two’ is of particular significance to him as it represents a symbiotic partnership bound by love but also fraught with tension.

© Sean Lee, from the series ‘Two People’; Source @ Landscape Stories

In an interview with Landscape Stories magazine, he described “I have been routinely choreographing performances and situations between my father, my mother, and me, since 2010. I used to think I knew what I was doing with the making of these images, but as time passed I became less certain. At times they seem to speak to me about the dreams and nightmares of childhood. Most of the time, however, they make me wonder about the strangeness of being a human organism and the mystery of being a family, of being a part of a lineage. I continue to photograph my parents because they are the only people who occur to me without my own choosing.”

The work focuses on the relationship between his parents to explore larger themes of love, tension, interdependency and sacrifice. Tentative and moving, these gentle frames of domestic life beckon at us to slow down and contemplate upon the concept of family and ephemeral nature of existence.

Mundane – Salma Abedin Prithi

Bangladesh artist, Salma Abedin Prithi, looks into the gruesome and dehumanising social violence that occurs on the everyday newspaper such as a man is beaten by his neighbours after complaining their music is too loud. A mother is murdered by a local mob suspecting her of kidnapping while she visits a school to inquire about admissions. A child is lynched by thirteen men after being accused of stealing a bicycle.

She stages these stories with her friends and family to reconstruct the psychological experience there was with beautiful harsh black and white staged images. The performative space created between the artist and the actor/ress allows improvisation to push further the participatory act of the actor’s interpretation of the story which are captured and emotionally felt by audience when looking through the images.

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© Salma Abedin Prithi, from the series ‘Mundane’; Source @ Salma Abedin Prithi

In an interview with Lensculture, she described, “The performances in my photographs were quite organic as I did not arrange any rehearsal, script, storyboard, or any other illustration. I need an intimate environment, and preferably accidental moments, to explore the unexpected, which often works better than a planned approach.”

© Salma Abedin Prithi, from the series ‘Mundane’; Source @ Salma Abedin Prithi

Prithi has created a body of work made up of nearly fifty images, split into two distinct streams that work in conversation with one another. Black and white photographs, harshly lit and capriciously surreal are paired with waxed photographs extracted from newspapers, collaged with textual erasures, sourced from the same. She explained that, “many of my photos are taken inside the same room, as these real events were connected to a common place and its morphology. Secondly, I tried to transform real newspaper photos and texts to an ambiguous poetry on such violence, to protest against the mundanity of everyday news.” 

Drawing the Event – Hirofumi Isoya

Another Japanese Artist, Hirofumi Isoya, who was one of the finalist at The Reference Asia shared his series Drawing the Event where he re-examines the consistency in recognition and the linear temporal axis through creating works. Most of the subject matters are familiar in our daily lives and how he manages to capture and record these fragments of life moments is what intrigue me the most with this series.

© Hirofumi Isoya, from the series ‘Drawing the Event’; Source @ The Reference Asia
Coins from the great powers are pressed against a palm as intensely as it becomes congested. The five rings are naturally reminiscent of the Olympic Games. This work, however, clearly presents the more essential subject that money is more stiff and tougher.

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Left: Expression and Metabolism(*02) is myself covering my chin with the t-shirt that I was wearing one day, creating the odd scene of my grown beard poking out of the t-shirt. There is the layer of a white cloth in between those of my chin and beard. What I found through several attempts was timing was very important for this work. My beard wouldn’t poke through the layer of the t-shirt if it was a half day earlier or later.

Right: Answer(*04) is another work from the series, which has a more personal narrative behind it. I photographed this work while arguing with my partner back then at a hotel in Germany. While having the long argument, I unconsciously kept chewing a straw sticking in a Starbucks cup. When I put the cup in front of a dresser, the deformed straw was reflected in the mirror as though two straws were facing each other. This scene was projecting the circumstance we were in and some symmetry that we had. 

These works mostly capture details of subjects, and reflect scenes and sensations that his body catches before he comprehend the whole circumstances. 

The colour of the images are decreased to sepia tone while one side of the frame remains a colour of the original photo. In the interview with The Reference Asia, he mentioned, “While a frame is generally considered as an additional matter to a photographic work, I rather consider my work has an image stuck on a frame which is a sculptural object. I aim to present multiple relationships including the presentness of the colored frame, the spared space between the photograph and the frame created by the process of manipulation, and the viewers’ thinking and disturbances about the outside of the frame which you pointed out.”

2:16.22 – Kensaku Seki

Japanese artist Kensaku Seki (with a background in physical education and himself also as an athlete) recently made a work 2:16.22 which looks at five athletes who stake their lives on the act of running and the on-going fight to set records. The work looks at the other side of glory in setting the record numbers – the sweat, the pain, the endurance etc came together for an artist book as well as an exhibition that is currently showing at Reminder Strongholds.

I really enjoyed the work perhaps because I was also a former swimmer and I resonate with the hardship behind the glorification.