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.

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

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.” 

Finger Play – Jinhee Kim

Awarded excellent for The Reference Asia photo prize, Korean artist Jinhee Kim‘s Finger Play series explores her own relationships with others and society using her distinctive technique of finely embroidering photographs.

© Jinhee Kim, from the series ‘Finger Play’; Source @ The Reference Asia

In the interview by The Reference Asia, the project birthed as a result of her body reaction to embroidering. She discovered she developed pompholyx, which caused blisters on her hands and feet. The blisters that she repeatedly got made her quite embarrassed and began thinking about contexts of the hand, which is one of the body parts most exposed to others, in a personal level and a social level.

“I started wondering why my rough hands embarrassed me. That made me start collecting images of hands generally considered ideal, which I saw on media…

…media instill stereotypes in people. Advertisements and magazines put emphasis on creating an image that resonates with a large audience. Especially, advertising images are both what a common recognition within a group creates, and what the recognition is created based on…

…while these images are unnaturally exaggerated, no one would think they are further from everyday life. They imprint the impression that these are the feminine, clean, beautiful hands in the audience’s mind.”

Other than adopting the traditional form of embroidery photographs by using found images of “ideal” female hands from media and advertisement, she developed the work further by photographing female hands sticking out of holes on printed materials and playing with the threads.

One of the jurors Gwen Lee commented, “Jinhee’s works Finger Play conjured up images of Dutch painter Juan Sanchez Cotan’s still life paintings. Instead of cabbage and apples, we see anonymous hands entering into panel of images (realities), connected by threads into subliminal realities. The illusion created through the layer of printed images (cut out images of hands from the magazine), embroidery, and hands hold an aura that is both eternal or disturbing.”

 

To be called mama – Miki Hasegawa

I am a total sucker when it comes to photobooks or series about family and home. Japanese photographer, Miki Hasegawa, focuses her works on maternal love, and social issues revolving around that. The more well-known work, Internal Notebook, is about the emotional cries of children raised in abusive homes (which she started as she was worried she would be doing the same thing to her daughter). She took portraits of those children along with the diaries and notebooks they have kept. The book was made with Yumi Goto at Reminders Photography Stronghold workshops.

This work was interesting, no doubt, but her other works Jewels, Teck-mac-mah-ya-con and To be called mama caught my eye more. The trilogy talks about her relationship with her daughter, in their everyday life, from seeing the world through her daughter’s eyes, to worrying about her flying away somedays and seeing a glimpse of her feminity. They are all stages of life which are universal between a mother and a child.

When you read the images, there are subtle differences in the feelings you get from the images or the series. Jewels give a more naive and playful point of view, that mirrors the action of a 3 years old child.

© Miki Hasegawa, from the series ‘Jewels’; Source @ Miki Hasegawa

Teck-mac-mah-ya-con has a sense of about to disappear.

© Miki Hasegawa, from the series ‘Teck-mac-mah-ya-con’; Source @ Miki Hasegawa

To be called mama really portrays the feminity of 5 years old as if she is a grown-up lady.

© Miki Hasegawa, from the series ‘To be called mama’; Source @ Miki Hasegawa

The Second Shift – Clare Gallagher

Sometimes I like photography work that is highly representational, but sometimes I love works that are just simple and more directive, that it doesn’t take a genius or knowledgeable brain to pick apart or understand. You know, entirely simple and close to us in our everyday.

Clare Gallagher, an Irish artist based in the UK, made laundry and the everyday chores just as beautiful. “Although there has been progress, women still resent the day-to-day reality of housework, its draining repetition and the anxieties it breeds,” Gallagher says. “The more I research the subject, the more I think it is tied to the relentless drive of capitalism, and informed by deeply embedded notions of female duty and respectability. What’s really annoying is that you become good at it – cooking dinner, cleaning, coaxing the kids, doing the laundry and making sure it dries fast. And then you go to your actual paid job. In both contexts, you are constantly being measured up and judged.” From the Guardian by Sean O’Hagan.

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© Clare Gallagher, from the book ‘The Second Shift’; Source @ Clare Gallagher

‘Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition. The clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.’ — Simone de Beauvoir

‘And what’s worse is that all of it, all of this work that I shouldn’t be doing, is taking place in the one place I shouldn’t have to be doing work at all: in fact, the one place I come to get away from work. It is taking place at home.’ — Edward Hollis

Get the book here: The Second Shift ; Review of the book by Jorg Colberg

Entrance to Our Valley – Jenia Fridlyand

“Entrance to Our Valley” was one of the picks from Photobookstores as one of the best photobooks 2019. Jenia Fridlyand, a Russian photographer, photographed with a large-format camera the 200-acre farm in the Hudson River Valley that Jenia and her husband bought for them and their entire family. The beautifully poetic black and white images of this place, which was purposed for a multi-generational home – “for our parents, who are now living more than five thousand miles from the place of their birth; for my husband and I, both first-generation immigrants; and for our children, so they could have the privilege of coming back to a place where they grew up.”

© Jenia Fridlyand, from the book ‘Entrance to Our Valley’; Source @ Fotoroom

Her work reminded me of photographic works by Raymond Meeks, Mark Steinmetz, Bryan Schutmaat, Jonathan Levitt etc. To me, they all possess a similar type of visual aesthetics which is intimate, calm and subtle that feels timeless yet still contemporary. Maybe it’s the everydayness that I like about these works, as it is not context-specific which everyone can easily relate to. I can easily resonate with most of the images here even though I am not a Russian, nor do I have a farm or live in the States.

Other references:

https://collectordaily.com/jenia-fridlyand-entrance-to-our-valley/

 

I Am Fat – Marie Hald

Danish photographer Marie Hald who won the World Press Photo Award, The Danish Picture of the Year and many other international prizes focuses thoroughly on projects about women and their relationship to beauty and the female body.

Recently I discovered her series “I am fat” through Witness, a publication on Medium, which documents girls from Scandinavia who are considered “fat” in the public eye.

“They’ve had enough. They refuse to be ashamed. They refuse to hide. And they’ve had enough of being shouted at. Stared at. Laughed at. Spat at. Of being objects of ridicule and hate on social media.”

Hald portrays young Scandinavian women who insist on living in their fat bodies without trying to change or become smaller. It is not a way of promoting fatness, it is about the permission to exist. Without being shamed.

The portraits of the girls are beautiful, showing dignity, power, confidence, and freedom. There is a sense of warmth in these photographs, and the way she chose to do the portraits intertwines with the everydayness e.g. riding the bike, being with a loved one, drinking a cup of tea etc. Even her choice of locations is very home-based or nature-based, reflecting on the concept that “fatness” is similar to our nature – it just exists.

© Marie Hald, from the series ‘I Am Fat’ ; Source @ Marie Hald

The problem of how they are being portrayed in the public still exists in the system and in society, even for countries like Denmark and Sweden. “Society talks about being fat like it’s a choice. You could just lose the weight, right? It’s not at all that simple.”

“I hired a ‘duola’ (a birth assistant)… but at the same time, I think it’s absolutely insane that I have to spend a thousand pounds from my own pocket to make sure that I’m treated as a human being by the health care system.”

“We were together the whole time. I thought we were probably soon going to be boyfriend and girlfriend — so I asked him. And he simply replied: ‘Well, I can’t be with you in the street. I can’t take you home to my family and friends. You’re fat.’”

To look on the controversy side, Hald created a new story called “The Girls from Malawa” which focuses on girls who have anorexia and bulimia. They all ties in with her earlier work called “Perfect Girls” which talks about the portray of being a woman in the current society. “My generation of girls does not compete for anything. We’re just fighting ourselves. Expectations for us are fierce and we feel tremendous pressure: To be right, to become something special. Stand out and perform. One must not fall into one with the crowd. We live in a time where we learn that we need to have the X-Factor. And if you can get famous it is top-notch. We must be slim, smart, look good, be good lovers and live a good social life. But what happens when the pressure becomes too much?”

Tales of the Invisible – Yanxin Guo

A hidden gem from the Lianzhou Foto festival was the series by Yanxin Guo “Tales of the Invisible”. Stamping from her personal experience when she returned to China last summer where she witnessed the biggest typhoon yet and 13 people died, it strikes her that the invisible can become something powerful and one should never overlook.

© Yanxin Guo, from the series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ ; Source @ Yanxin Guo

Her series of photographs are images which hints the invisibles through the visible. Clean, poetic and sentimental images transcend this strong feeling that there is some magical power in the nature which is stirring behind e.g. an image of a gush of water in the ocean pairing with the boy curling up, or the lite up trees at night pairing with a portrait of a Chinese girl with her hair blowing.

© Yanxin Guo, from the series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ ; Source @ Yanxin Guo

The images are subtle, which combined with the fragmented story written by Guo reinforced further the concept of “Tales of the Invisible”. The series is highly metaphorical yet could be easily felt and filled the room with mystery.

© Yanxin Guo, from the series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ ; Source @ Yanxin Guo

© Michelle Chan, series ‘Tales of the Invisible’ by Yanxin Guo at 15th Edition Lianzhou Foto Festival 2019

 

The book will be printed soon so watch out for this one.