chicken trap, 2009, ICZ

I am not saying animal traps and animal experiments in the name of science are a cruel representation of our relationship with nature. In fact, I find these traps and experiments a necessary process and development between our relationship with animals and nature. This may sound ironic but we live in ironic times. I am not an activist and I approach my observations through art.

My friend who worked for one of those ’society of prevention of cruelty to animals’ once told me that he felt the society’s agenda had an objective play on subjectivity and their political agenda was problematic. My friend later moved to Africa and opened up a wildlife hunting ranch. His ranch, along with other hunting ranches, now supports some of the biggest wildlife conservation projects in Africa.

Zoos are important to us today. Zoos must be important because without Zebras in Zoos, my niece might never comprehend the true meaning of the alphabet ‘Z’. She could not remember what Z was for until I brought her to the Singapore Zoo. Now, to her, Z is both for Zoos and Zebras. The idea is not so much that animals are living in un-natural spaces and that they are suffering but rather it has become of one the last ‘refuge’ which animals can still survive alongside humans.

He was dressed in green and brown. He was rather well camouflaged in the park. This will later seem rather useless in the  the kind of images he was going to create.

It was in the park where I got my first profound understanding of how wildlife images are created.

He was going around with a camera mounted on a tripod, with a large flash and lens. He was shooting everything and anything. I was sitting on the bench waiting for my dad.

I remembered he suddenly squatted down. I could hear a little bird chirping, it had fallen out of its nest. I could hear the photographer’s camera clicks getting more frequent.

I walked towards the commotion. The photographer didn’t really mind my curiosity. I offered some ice-cream to the bird for comfort, and the photographer carried on snapping.

The bird wasn’t exactly little, it was like a little adult, with a three quarter grown plumage.

I remembered lying on the the grass to get a  better look at the bird. The bird hopped towards me and stared at me.

I was looking at the bird for the longest time. I remembered looking into the bird’s eyes and my mind started to travel.

I realized from the bird, I was part of a system larger then my family. Maybe I was projecting my thoughts too much on the mute animal, maybe I was already separating my distinct human self from the animal. But something profound happened that made me realize I was rather lonely without animals and somehow the bird had a more beautiful concept of freedom then me. I was the one that was trapped. Later in my adult life I will proceed to trap many other animals to make sense of the natural system we are apart from or rather a part of. I am lonely and at the same time, I yearn to be together with animals.

The little bird hopped onto my hands and after singing a little chirp of a song, it flew off into the sky.

ID, 2006 Zhao Renhui

“7.59. What happens a minute before 8am? Straits Time photographers show their interpretation of that moment in the Prime pages every Monday entitled 7.59. We aim to capture everyday scenes across the island with a different perspective, bringing readers a slice of life that would perhaps go unnoticed.” From The Straits Time, every Monday.

The document as Local God

For Paradise Lost, I assume a role of an artist for artists.

Documentary photography to me, is an attempt to ‘document’ ‘reality’. The photographer documents in his own perspective (be it a staged narrative or a pre-existing scenario) and creates a perceivable and apparent reality. This reality can slip and slide in different contexts. In the context of a newspaper, the construct of this reality can be naive. (In the context of a gallery exhibition, it can be confusing.) Regardless of whether the photographs in the 7.59 section in The Straits Times were really taken at 7.59, we tend to believe and even worship images passively, indirectly or sub-consciously.

Mobile Upload, Saddam Hussein

At 8.15 everyday, I wake up to my desktop computer which doubles as my alarm. The images I am bombarded with everyday come mainly from Facebook. These documents are my reality. I find images from my friends’ ‘Mobile Uploads’ particularly interesting because these days, they seem like the ultimate truth. I tend not to question these images because their position in the image world is almost sacred. My understanding of Saddam Hussein’s execution, tsunamis and riots has been informed by other kinds of ‘Mobile Uploads’. The ‘Mobile Upload’ informing an event can be doctored, but it really doesn’t matter to me.

Having his own brand of ‘Mobile Uploads’ is Wong Yung Choon in his series, Compromised Circumstances. He shot this series secretly on a mobile phone on the train. The Facebook page I don’t like to squeeze on the MRT currently has a following of 47,000 fans. It includes a wall with daily musings by commuters ranting how crowded a train carriage can be during peak hours. While everyone sees this as an inconvenient ritual, Yung Choon has taken a step back by looking in. The project acts as an investigation into the intrusion of personal space in the public realm, and how personal space can be compromised through both surveillance and social circumstances. The artist also becomes part of the subject in question — he is part of the crowd being packed like sardines in the carriages, the very objects of his documentation.

Yung Choon says, ’The tension intrigues me. I try to resist aestheticising the subject. It is more about presenting an inconvenient evidence.’

Photography is inconvenient anyway.

In a place like Singapore, where space is getting scarce, the portrayal and investigation into spacial issues becomes tricky. People are sensitive to a formal investigation into these often tight and personal spaces. Traditional genres of landscapes are forsaken for the portrayal of human presences in urban spaces. Yung Choon, Liana Yang, Koh Yee Ling, Alecia Neo and Ang Song Nian have tried to portray a new understanding and interpretation of these spaces and how they define our presence in the city. Their portrayals of these spaces are tied into sensibilities very much associated with their medium, such as the nature of looking.

Robert Capa - Death of a Loyalist militiaman, Cerro Muriano, Córdoba front, Spain, September 5, 1936 © Cornell Capa/Magnum - International Center of Photography

Honesty as a policy

The famous image of Robert Capa’s soldier being shot in mid-air is not real. It has been said that he could have actually created the situation by posing the soldier for an open shot by the enemy. source

It is heartening for me to know that not all relationships are constructed for the camera. In his series of images, Ah Pa, the intimacy and closeness that Matthew Teo shares with his father is both psychological and literal. Ah Pa means ‘Dad’ in Mandarin. The images are an intense personal exploration of a father-and-son relationship, and an intimate view into the life of a Chinese family in Singapore. It is hard not to associate Matthew’s with that of British photographer Richard Billingham and American photographer Nan Goldin. What is different about Matthew’s work was that it enabled him to bridge relationships which he never knew existed.

In Matthew’s words: ‘It occurred to me that at the end of the day, many of my actions were a reflection of his. It was photography that allowed me to bridge the distance between me and my father.’

The intangible portrayals of relationships is also present in the works of Liana, Alecia and Yee Ling. Their works can be grouped into the traditional genre of Portraiture. Their strength lies in their ambiguous aesthetic sensibilities. I no longer find myself asking ‘who’ but rather ‘why’.

‘Truth is in the seeing, not in the thinking’

“I am most drawn to individuals with stories to tell, common people with imperfections. I see my own vulnerability in theirs. I love how photography allows me to form new relationships with people, and how it allows an entry point to the unknown.” Alecia Neo

In Home Visits, the subjects of Alecia’s commonplace portraits are her neighbours. Her interest lies in patiently observing the specifics of her neighbours’ homes. Her approach is quite unfamiliar in local photography, because instead of hunting for subject matters which could be otherwise aestheticised, she reflects upon her immediate surroundings. Her approach is a departure from the stereotypical photojournalistic images of superficial narratives, and breathes new life to the representation of an aspect of Singapore’s social fabric.

An even more intimate investigation, Into Hiding/Hidden away is a series of self-portraits and intimate reflections of Yee Ling’s personal response to her surroundings in a foreign land, New York. The autobiographical theme, which flows through several bodies of her work, presents to her an endless potential to explore questions about ourselves in relation to the world around us.

What is most interesting to me is her self-conscious and often nervous invisibility within the image. Her act of disappearance can be seen both as a form of defense or as a wish to blend into the environment.

The loss of the human figure is also evident in Liana’s work, Duality, in which she turns her camera and interest to the bedrooms of couples. The couples who share a relationship have their own rooms, and some of these rooms appear similar and some not at all. Liana photographs their empty rooms and places these photographs side by side. The artist pays attention to traces rather than the tangible presence of human relationships. One’s reading of these images is always connected by the text she offers and by the two separate images’ ability to resonate and to transcend each other.

What’s deadpan?

I was at the opening night of the Singapore International Photography Festival up at Mt Sophia. There was a buffet, lots of people mingling, and by the way, an exhibition going on. The exhibition was Land of a thousand struggles by Sohrab Hura, with photographs that speak about unemployment, land shortage and economic deprivation — uncomfortable stuff for the average Singaporean. But the opening night was really everything else but difficult. Perhaps on opening nights, we ignore these images because we all don’t enjoy looking at images on opening nights anyway.

The situation reminds of Angelique Pan’s series (not in this exhibition) “Happy times in troubled lands”. She documented photo-documentary exhibitions’ opening nights where the guests are shown to be having fun against the backdrop of difficult pictures in the background, such as scenes from the Iraq war, children suffering and tsunami victims.

In this way, it becomes understandable why some contemporary practitioners want to avoid the weight of emotive photography, its connotations and its baggage. Song Nian and Eiffel Chong have chosen to turn their cameras towards objects and scenarios in our daily life. Their documents allow us to create a space of contemplation rather then consumption.

Poised like a formalised voyeur, Song Nian photographs the privatization of public spaces. His work, Sidewalk Easements, is a record of improvised external spaces for HDB residents on the ground floor, who often utilise the spaces outside their homes. The photographs reveal a clutter of functional, decorative and religious objects. His focus is on impermanence and on the ideals modified by the reality of space constraints in Singapore. They also speak eloquently about the traces left by human activity and how we try to shape and customize the environment we live in.

Photography trivializes death

Eiffel is writing a contemporary history of nature in his series, A matter of life and death. By titling his images with titles of novels, the series portrays how we live with nature as a daily fiction that we have written ourselves. His work is an extreme form of what nature documentaries do, which is to offer us a glimpse of nature that we will never know in reality. The fiction drives us further away from ‘true’ nature, thus marking a death note on nature.

I am a liar and any form of self-critique in this note would seem like a lie. Which is exactly what I shall confess. My photography is always an attempt to be truthful, but it will never be. That, to me, is beautiful. Photography allows me to be part of the reality that is taking place when I create images.

The ID photograph on my passport is a painting. I have never been questioned about my photograph being a painting by any customs officials in the last eight countries I have visited. The only comment ever made on my painting ID was by the lady over the desk when I made my passport two years ago. Mrs Mariana Jain, 31, who sits on Level 3 of the Immigrations Department, said that my photograph looked like a painting.

Photography cannot simply function as a document. Today, the contemporary document is culturally referential, socially unambiguous and most importantly, artistically realistic.

++++++++++

Paradise Lost presents recent work by eight photographers which extends and redefines a tradition of documentary photography in our region. Whilst they clearly belong to that tradition by engaging with a range of issues or simply by recording aspects of our contemporary world, their work does not conform to the conventional methods and style of documentary photography.

Contemporary documentary has moved away from emotive social issues. The documents in Paradise Lost shy away from this approach, and are instead witnesses to intimate family albums, landscapes, private spaces and public realms, performative events and surveillance. Some of the works consist of events invented solely to be documented by the camera. Other works conform to the conventions of ‘straight’ photography by recording found objects and scenes. These artists photographed immediate families, neighbors and spaces, and resist the urge to travel to exotic and unfamiliar terrain. Their approach is honest (apparently) and abandons the burden to aesthetically sensationalise the subject matter.

What unites all of these photographers is the attempt to use photography not merely as a technique but to push the photographic document towards a critical discourse. It is a discourse on both the medium and the subject matter. Ranging from personal reconstructions of how an artist might relate to her environment to the reinvestigation of mundane landscapes, these images – in their different ways – make us rethink our presence in and engagement with the contemporary world. They re-establish a space for conversations, conversations of our artistic and philosophical concerns of our place in the world.

Eiffel Chong, A matter of life and death

Wong Yong Choon, Compromised Circumstances

]]> http://www.zhaorenhui.com/blog/travels/?feed=rss2&p=43 http://www.zhaorenhui.com/blog/travels/?p=32 http://www.zhaorenhui.com/blog/travels/?p=32#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:33:17 +0000 pianist http://www.zhaorenhui.com/blog/travels/?p=32 Pocock: What do you mean by real reality?

Ruff: Photography has been used for all kinds of interests for the past 150 years. Most of the photos we come across today aren’t really authentic anymore–they have the authenticity of a manipulated and prearranged reality. You have to know the conditions of a particular photograph in order to understand it properly because the camera just copes what is in front of it.

Pocock: Why did photography become so important in the art world?

Ruff: Maybe it’s a question of generations. My generation, maybe the generation before, grew up with photography, television, magazines. The surrounding is different from a hundred years ago. Photography became the most influential medium in the Western world. So nowadays you don’t have to paint to be an artist. You can use photography in a realistic, sachlich way. You can even do abstract photographs. It’s become autonomous.

From, The journal of contemporary art

The elephant,
An asteroid
That struck earth
And walked.

The moth,
An autumn leaf
Still flying
Without a breeze.

Dolphins,
Waves
That did not vanish
Into the sea.

Jellyfish,
Dreams
Of drowned
Mariners.

The lion,
A field of sun
Curled up
For the night.

Each minnow,
A pebble
The ocean caressed
And coaxed to life.

Boria Sax, 2009,

originally from The Raven’s Wing

Tottori Cockroach, Adult Male, 1913 Dr.Dong holding speciemen

This Friday, I will be embarking along a trip of a lifetime. After much persuasion and convincing, The Director, Tomo, along with the board of companies, has approved of my trip into the unmarked zone down at the Tottori Sand Dunes, where the amazing cream white cockroaches thrive. Before you go googling them up, don’t. All you will get are white moulted skins of cockroaches found at the back of fridges.

The Tottori Cockroaches is a close relative of the common german cockroach which is found all over the world. They resemble closely to the international pest version but a little tad more sensible in their aesthetic evolution. From what I gather from the Institute’s documents in the 2003 expedition, they have found the cockroaches to be extremely toxic. This is due to their diet. They feed on the roots and leaves of the eastern Juniper which are extremely toxic. The zoologists are not able to figure out if the cockroaches have produced enzymes to detoxify the poisons of the plant, or the cockroaches simply poison their bodies and at the same time preserved their bodies from being eaten in the desert. It appears the enzymes of the poisonous leaves and roots cause the cockroaches to lose their yellow coloration slowly. A younger Tottori cockroach would appear more yellowish then a slightly older cockroach. It is not known if the young is born totally brown and lose their pigmentation as they age.

The origins of how the cockroaches came to be discovered are interesting. The research and re-discovery was one of the promising results of the Institute’s initiative to constantly break the barriers of art and science. One of the first artist in resident, Thomas Horniman, came across a picture of a white Tottori cockroach in the institute’s 200 year old archive in 1999. The photograph showed a white insect being held in the hands of the late Dr.Dong. Thinking nothing of it, he continued to browse through the archives. Thomas became more curious with Dr.Dong’s images as he dug deeper. In 1913, Dr.Dong made numerous trips to the Tottori Desert. As the archive was scattered in bits and pieces, Thomas couldn’t really make up what Dr.Dong was searching for in the desert. There were excavators and diggers all around his photographs. It had never occur to him that Dr.Dong was looking for the Tottori Cockroaches. It appears that Dr.Dong was aware of the presence of the species but had wanted to study the insect in its natural habitat at greater detail. Thomas later made the link with the first image after extensive translation and research was done on the documents.

There are no further documents after 1914 by Dr.Dong, artifacts of even specimens of the Tottori Cockroaches in the archive. Nobody really knew if Dr.Dong found anything from his expeditions.

And that was what Thomas wanted to know, to find out if Dr.Dong found anything more on the Tottori Cockroaches. In 2000, Thomas with 8 other zoologists set out to re-trace Dr.Dong’s expedition.

I had a chat with Thomas over the phone earlier, and he told me at that point of time, he felt like he was an archaeologist and a zoologist who had to remind himself he was an artist. He felt like an archaeologist looking for the forgotten city of Dr.Dong’s excavation grounds. He also felt like a zoologist looking for a lost and mythical creature. He kept in mind that his mission was to present these information and research with an aesthetic treatment different from science.

Thomas and his team manage to re-trace Dr.Dong’s exact excavation sites. It was only to be 2 years later that Thomas managed to capture a pure white adult specimen. Thomas had made 8 trips back to Tottori since his first trip. The reason they took so long to discover the adult speciemen was because whiter adults tend to dig as deep as 2 m below the surface of the ground and come out only very rarely at night and almost never in the day. “You would think that they were white to blend into the sand, but I realize they could also be white because they shun away from the sun for so long.”

A lot of specialized equipment was used to excavate a fully grown white Tottori cockroach from 2m below the sand. It was a lot of trail and error on the team to finally formulate a way to bring the cockroach back to the surface after locating one. 

“We come across smaller and yellow ones throughout the night but we have always hoped to catch a pure white one, like the one in Dr.Dong’s image.” said Thomas. Today, Thomas is still mystified by how Dr.Dong managed to retrieve his Tottori cockroach in 1913. “You would have thought you wanted to share this knowledge and discovery with the rest of the world.” 

And perhaps the unknowability of this discovery shall always stay within the walls of The Institute of Critical Zoologists. Like how all knowledge is created and shared and shaped by science, there are some that will shy away and survive to become myths. The Institute seems perfectly fine that the status of the Tottori cockroaches will remain this way. If you think that this is the decision of the companies funding the Institute to keep this a secret, think again. The decision for this closure was in fact a conscious decision by the directors at the Institute. The directors first weigh if the announcement of the discovery of the species is in anyway beneficial for its current survival as a species. Next they consider if the cockroaches really need to be discovered by humans.

“Seeing that the Tottori Sand Dunes gets trampled by 10am almost every day in the tourist swamped areas, the Institute was convinced that the community at large should not really know about them.” Thomas said that the knowledge was addictive as well. Within 2 months of their discovery of the first adult cockroach, the team dug up 498 others within the region. “Maybe Dr.Dong knew that sometimes an amazing discovery may not necessarily help a species at all, not when they have evolved to elude us humans.” 

Trap Setter with Black Crested Gibbon (Nomascus concolor) Trap

The ball, later turned out to be a monkey trap, an ingenious contraption created by the locals to trap gibbons. There were many versions of this trap before the one I was staring. The igmoks have perfected their trap to the shape of a ball.

Setting up of new tiger farms, Japan 2008, Official Opening

My photographs examine the curiosity and increasing disconnection that exists between humans and the natural world. My work explores simulation, spectacle, and reconstruction. My practice looks at points of intersection with animals in our human-made world—our coexistence—and explores notions of their spectacle and the reality of loss through mediation.

In the past five years, my interest has been filtered through  documentations and current trends on the zoological gaze in zoos, natural history museums and circuses. I wanted to know why looking at  live and dead animals is considered enjoyable in our society. My work  serves as a point of imagination and discussion upon our relationship  with animals.

http://hypnozoo.blogspot.com/2008/10/frre-le-tigre.html

“The reality is that we are merely human and can never hope fully to understand animals. The successful portrait will capture that mystery by distilling what John Berger describes:

“The animal scrutinizes [Man] across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension…
The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non- comprehension…He is always looking across ignorance and fear.”

In ages past, animals were surrounded by a sense of mystery and humans had a
heightened respect for them as a result.  Our perception of ever-accumulating
knowledge has destroyed that respect. Re-discovery of a sense of mystery
surrounding animals may help revive our respect for our fellow creatures.
How can one engage the viewer in an attempt to get closer and have a
metaphorical conversation with these animals yet emerge with a heightened
sense of mystery and a recognition of our limitations, as mere humans, in ever being
able to understand the non-human animal?

Taken from Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia Musings on Animal Portraiture
… and its role as a Conservation tool   .