View From This Side
Installation views courtesy Yeo Workshop.
View From This Side takes its name from words printed on the cardboard slide mount of source photographs, where this instruction was placed to help viewers look at images in the way and direction the maker intended. In these works, I use this instruction as a starting point to take a closer look at materials and processes surrounding these slides. From here, several questions arise: Is there a wrong way, or a right way, to look at images of the past? To remember one’s own history, or one that is communal? Does this way of looking symbolise a broader schema, one that influences how one sees, what one values? What is this side from which to look?
The presentation of View From This Side is the final segment of a constellation of works that began with the bag of family slides from the late 1960s to 70s, mostly taken by my parents. The slides depict a coming-of-age, through a migratory path through Australia, Malaysia and Singapore. While earlier bodies of work in this constellation consider and depict how geography and history are imprinted into the slides over time, here, the works’ own making enters the image, surfacing the processuality of meaning-making that is embedded. They also mediate aspects of nostalgia that are deeply coded in these old photographs, through colour, technological abstraction and surface.
Through these modes, they expand upon systems and grids that seem to dictate ways of being and looking, and also present opportunities for novel ways of looking forward, and remembering. In visualising the aesthetics of their making, the works seek to rationalise and address what is often emotionally uploaded, nostalgic, and affects us in ways sometimes unfathomable. At the same time, they create a space for looking, and projecting, between abstraction and nostalgia.
Conversation with Lee Weng Choy about material and process: The Micro-History and the Photograph
