(2018)

13x50: 650 photo prints on tissue

Untitled: 4 channel text and image video projection. 12 min

“you think it over slowly, slowly choose...” is a work comprising two parts - 13x50 and untitled, made up of family snapshots and my footage, where the fragility and precarity of a life is articulated through the photograph and its form. 13x50 comprises 650 3R-sized photographic tissue (kleenex) prints and untitled is a 4-channel video and text projection installation.

The project begins with an inquiry into my grandaunt, who looked after my sisters and myself as small children. She crossed into Singapore in 1955 with her 10-year-old son when it was still a British Crown colony, before it became an independent country and nation state in 1965. Grandaunt lived in Singapore for 50 years till her death in 2004. During that time, she was stateless and excluded from the privileges of citizenship; she was trapped in a place that wasn’t a country when she arrived and excluded her after it became one.

To make sense of the history, I approached family members in Penang, Malaysia, and Singapore and conducted interviews, found photographs and papers. Narratives overlapped. Memories were hazy, temporally uncertain.

There are 13 existing photographs of grandaunt found across the families - birthdays, a graduation, a wedding. In the tissue work, each of the 13 3R photo prints is re-photographed 50 times with different crops and focuses with my smartphone, an everyday photographic device held close to one's body. Each frame highlights particular relationships through specific representations of touch, place, people and objects in the photographs. One shot is made for every year she was in Singapore. 13 become 650 photo-prints on tissue paper. Tissue is a common, everyday material used on bodies, fragile, disposable and appears weightless. Its tactile fragility is keenly felt when one holds the print in one’s hand. The material degrades the image in terms of sharpness, colour, and exactness of reproduction. The tissue is translucent and porous, and the image has two sides.

In reworking old family photographs, this work refocuses and repositions their narratives, considering the encounters had with family members and the elusive and fragile nature of these memories in their retelling. The use of family photographs and tissue also question and comment upon the relationship between the state and the person, the value of the individual implied by the State’s denial of an elderly lady’s citizenship, and the internalising of this value in the retelling of her story.

Untitled in “you think it over slowly, slowly choose...” is a 4-channel video and text projection installation. The three text channels comprise literal truncated translations (from Cantonese to English) from interviews of two family members conducted during the reconstruction of these memories and events, reflecting gaps. The image channel depicts a silent excerpt of the interview with her son. The text channels are unsynchronised, allowing new meaning to be created as the different texts appear. The silent video channel is projected onto a two-sided screen. The life-sized image of her son, who is seated on the floor, hangs slightly above the viewer who would be seated close in front of the screen, hung such that the screen moves slightly as viewers move past. The video appears alternately with a blank video of the same duration. The four channels are positioned such that the viewers have to choose between the information presented in the text, and the video image of the man whose life and family the texts are about.

Below shows documentation of different exhibitions of 13x50, and documentation of untitled at NUS Museum.