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About the PhotographerSim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions, and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, memory, and extraction. She is currently based in Berlin. Sim was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017. Sim is also doing a visual practice-based PhD at King’s College London. Her new book She Never Rode That Trishaw Again was released June 2021. |
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Truth in Photography: How would complete the sentence, truth in photography is…
Sim Chi Yin: Questionable. (laughs) To be questioned. That's very much where I am, I suppose. In general, I think truth is to be questioned. Not necessarily truth in photography. I mean, whose truth are we talking about? What truth? Those are the kind of questions that I've been working with in the past few years. I came from my first two degrees in history. So I was kind of steeped in the ways of looking in archives, relying on documents, looking for evidence to create some kind of truth based on the best evidence you can find. The first ten years of my career was in journalism. In writing, not even in photography. So, again, it was a kind of truth-seeking vocation. With a pretense, I suppose, of objectivity. And then this, now, into my third career, I'm really questioning that and turning that on its head.
Sim Chi Yin: Questionable. (laughs) To be questioned. That's very much where I am, I suppose. In general, I think truth is to be questioned. Not necessarily truth in photography. I mean, whose truth are we talking about? What truth? Those are the kind of questions that I've been working with in the past few years. I came from my first two degrees in history. So I was kind of steeped in the ways of looking in archives, relying on documents, looking for evidence to create some kind of truth based on the best evidence you can find. The first ten years of my career was in journalism. In writing, not even in photography. So, again, it was a kind of truth-seeking vocation. With a pretense, I suppose, of objectivity. And then this, now, into my third career, I'm really questioning that and turning that on its head.
TiP: It’s a complicated question when we start thinking about truth and memory and memory is so often inexact. Could you talk a little bit about looking for truth in memories, looking for truth in snapshots? We’re looking at the past through the eyes of the present.
Sim: Memory is famously unreliable, and it's often interpreted from the point of view of the contemporary, but I am interested in taking memory for what it is. I'm not trying to say that it is the truth. I think it is a version of somebody's truth or a fragment of somebody's mind. I'm not overly romantic about the fact that I've gone and interviewed people 60, 70 years after the war. There's no way that the information could be verified or verifiable. I've stopped believing that I need to seek the truth. I am not actually trying to triple verify anything. I've come away from the training of a historian and the training and vocation of journalist, and I am actually quite liberated and excited to be practicing in a space that is somewhat more of an artistic space.
What memory gives us is then a starting point for me to create something else. It takes us into a space of imagination, a slightly surreal realm that is not tied to specific histories or specific realities and gives people the room to reflect, think, and imagine for themselves. I'm not trying to be prescriptive in my work anymore. This is a real shift from what I used to do. The older work was very straight-ahead documentary. It was very advocacy driven. It was very didactic. I'm not interested in doing that kind of work at the moment. I think memory's very unreliable, but it's also magical and valuable for what it is.
You could say the same of oral history, right? Oral history is also up for a lot of debate within the academic realms. The old school historians will tell you that oral history is not legitimate as a source, but I am respecting the oral histories and the fragments of memory that people share with me for what they are and using them as a jumping off point to make work from. I'm not holding it up and saying this is the truth or this is verified, objective pieces of information about the past. I'm not doing that. I'm not actually interested in doing that at this point.
TiP: It seems what you're saying is that in art, it's the perception of the person experiencing the photograph, the video, the experience that is primary. And each person comes away with their own impression, because ultimately, in some sense, the truth of art is in the response.
Sim: I think there are at least two different parts to the work. There is the dimension that is still documentary in its core, which is very much about restituting the missing voices in the official archive. It’s about giving voice and documenting the people who have been silenced or erased. They are given space to sing, to speak, to remember. And those pieces are presented just as is, unembellished. The objects are also in these very straightforward still-life photographs that are unembellished by me. I'm just presenting them as is.
And then the second part of it really is the interpretation of it by the viewer. It’s not just something that's airy fairy and put up for interpretation at will, but there's also the strong documentary impulse to recover or excavate or restitute some of these missing parts of the historiography.
Sim: Memory is famously unreliable, and it's often interpreted from the point of view of the contemporary, but I am interested in taking memory for what it is. I'm not trying to say that it is the truth. I think it is a version of somebody's truth or a fragment of somebody's mind. I'm not overly romantic about the fact that I've gone and interviewed people 60, 70 years after the war. There's no way that the information could be verified or verifiable. I've stopped believing that I need to seek the truth. I am not actually trying to triple verify anything. I've come away from the training of a historian and the training and vocation of journalist, and I am actually quite liberated and excited to be practicing in a space that is somewhat more of an artistic space.
What memory gives us is then a starting point for me to create something else. It takes us into a space of imagination, a slightly surreal realm that is not tied to specific histories or specific realities and gives people the room to reflect, think, and imagine for themselves. I'm not trying to be prescriptive in my work anymore. This is a real shift from what I used to do. The older work was very straight-ahead documentary. It was very advocacy driven. It was very didactic. I'm not interested in doing that kind of work at the moment. I think memory's very unreliable, but it's also magical and valuable for what it is.
You could say the same of oral history, right? Oral history is also up for a lot of debate within the academic realms. The old school historians will tell you that oral history is not legitimate as a source, but I am respecting the oral histories and the fragments of memory that people share with me for what they are and using them as a jumping off point to make work from. I'm not holding it up and saying this is the truth or this is verified, objective pieces of information about the past. I'm not doing that. I'm not actually interested in doing that at this point.
TiP: It seems what you're saying is that in art, it's the perception of the person experiencing the photograph, the video, the experience that is primary. And each person comes away with their own impression, because ultimately, in some sense, the truth of art is in the response.
Sim: I think there are at least two different parts to the work. There is the dimension that is still documentary in its core, which is very much about restituting the missing voices in the official archive. It’s about giving voice and documenting the people who have been silenced or erased. They are given space to sing, to speak, to remember. And those pieces are presented just as is, unembellished. The objects are also in these very straightforward still-life photographs that are unembellished by me. I'm just presenting them as is.
And then the second part of it really is the interpretation of it by the viewer. It’s not just something that's airy fairy and put up for interpretation at will, but there's also the strong documentary impulse to recover or excavate or restitute some of these missing parts of the historiography.
TiP: Your book She Never Rode That Trishaw Again has lots of snapshots. What is the role of snapshots? Why are you using snapshots in your work and presenting them? Are you recontextualizing them?
Sim: This is the first time I've done that. This is quite an unusual piece that doesn't really fit with the rest of my work, in a way. This book actually came out of long discussions I've been having with book designer Teun van der Heijden, who's based in Amsterdam and has done a lot of photo books. My obsession really was with excavating my grandfather's story. And I never thought about my grandmother on her own. Only in the context of my grandfather did I think about her. Then one year I went back to Malaysia and went into the storeroom of my aunt's and found these photo albums of hers. And I was just very struck by these travel vacation snapshots that she had and how widely traveled she was for a woman of her time. She's easily the most well-traveled person in our entire family, including me. I travel for a living, in some ways. I also found a stack of expired passports. They had stamps from different countries, and they were quite fascinating to me.
I just kind of left it, and then in discussing the three-book project with the book designer, he asked me, “You talk about your grandfather all the time, but what actually happened to your grandmother? She was the one who was left behind after his execution. What happened to her? Is there a story to be told?” Then I said, “Well, actually, I did find these vacation photo albums.” And so we started to look at them. And the original idea was to make a little book that was going to be kind of an epilogue to the grandfather book. But then the more we looked at the vacation photographs, the more we found them interesting in and of themselves. We decided to make a book on its own and to make that the prologue and not the epilogue. I ordinarily probably wouldn't use family snapshots on their own like that, but in this case, it's contextualized by the text, which works in juxtaposition to the images. It’s almost like a reconstructed road movie of this woman's traveling, globetrotting life. I hope it has meaning for people when they look at these types of photographs, because I think it's a very familiar form to all of us. We all have vacation snapshots like that in front of iconic sites that we want to remember, Disneyland and the like, and so I think it's a very accessible, familiar form for people.
And in this case, I'm using that as a visual device to try to tell a story of a lifelong trauma of this woman who was widowed during the Cold War, and there were many, many like her. I'm hoping that the use of the vernacular photographs, the snapshots, could offer that kind of resonance and access to other people.
Sim: This is the first time I've done that. This is quite an unusual piece that doesn't really fit with the rest of my work, in a way. This book actually came out of long discussions I've been having with book designer Teun van der Heijden, who's based in Amsterdam and has done a lot of photo books. My obsession really was with excavating my grandfather's story. And I never thought about my grandmother on her own. Only in the context of my grandfather did I think about her. Then one year I went back to Malaysia and went into the storeroom of my aunt's and found these photo albums of hers. And I was just very struck by these travel vacation snapshots that she had and how widely traveled she was for a woman of her time. She's easily the most well-traveled person in our entire family, including me. I travel for a living, in some ways. I also found a stack of expired passports. They had stamps from different countries, and they were quite fascinating to me.
I just kind of left it, and then in discussing the three-book project with the book designer, he asked me, “You talk about your grandfather all the time, but what actually happened to your grandmother? She was the one who was left behind after his execution. What happened to her? Is there a story to be told?” Then I said, “Well, actually, I did find these vacation photo albums.” And so we started to look at them. And the original idea was to make a little book that was going to be kind of an epilogue to the grandfather book. But then the more we looked at the vacation photographs, the more we found them interesting in and of themselves. We decided to make a book on its own and to make that the prologue and not the epilogue. I ordinarily probably wouldn't use family snapshots on their own like that, but in this case, it's contextualized by the text, which works in juxtaposition to the images. It’s almost like a reconstructed road movie of this woman's traveling, globetrotting life. I hope it has meaning for people when they look at these types of photographs, because I think it's a very familiar form to all of us. We all have vacation snapshots like that in front of iconic sites that we want to remember, Disneyland and the like, and so I think it's a very accessible, familiar form for people.
And in this case, I'm using that as a visual device to try to tell a story of a lifelong trauma of this woman who was widowed during the Cold War, and there were many, many like her. I'm hoping that the use of the vernacular photographs, the snapshots, could offer that kind of resonance and access to other people.
Video walkthrough of She Never Rode That Trishaw Again
TiP: I think that there's the sense of discovery in the design of the book, which I was intrigued by, in the way in which you use the postcard. I want to have the book so I can pull out the postcards.
Sim: You really have to hold it, pull them out yourself, and read the translations of the texts. The postcards, I also found in that storeroom, and they are postcards that either she bought on her travels or, in one case, a postcard that she wrote to her children on her travels. And then the reverse of that happened when her children were old enough, they traveled and brought postcards back to mom.
My oldest uncle was raised to be a very stingy man. So he counts every single cent. There's a very funny postcard that he wrote to his mother that says, “Dear mother, we arrived in Switzerland yesterday. We were staying in a motel, and it costs thirty-five francs, and we had dinner. Oh my God, everything is so expensive here.” He's basically giving her a laundry list of his budget or whatever money he spent so far. It's very, very inane details. But I just thought it was a very interesting insight into her family's life in the aftermath of losing the father figure in the family. In another note, her youngest son writes to her and says, “Dear mother, I write to tell you the good news that I've just passed my grade A music examination. I'm too busy to write more now. I'll write you again later.” It's just little fragments of family communications like that.
Sim: You really have to hold it, pull them out yourself, and read the translations of the texts. The postcards, I also found in that storeroom, and they are postcards that either she bought on her travels or, in one case, a postcard that she wrote to her children on her travels. And then the reverse of that happened when her children were old enough, they traveled and brought postcards back to mom.
My oldest uncle was raised to be a very stingy man. So he counts every single cent. There's a very funny postcard that he wrote to his mother that says, “Dear mother, we arrived in Switzerland yesterday. We were staying in a motel, and it costs thirty-five francs, and we had dinner. Oh my God, everything is so expensive here.” He's basically giving her a laundry list of his budget or whatever money he spent so far. It's very, very inane details. But I just thought it was a very interesting insight into her family's life in the aftermath of losing the father figure in the family. In another note, her youngest son writes to her and says, “Dear mother, I write to tell you the good news that I've just passed my grade A music examination. I'm too busy to write more now. I'll write you again later.” It's just little fragments of family communications like that.
We came upon this idea of the Japanese fold for the pages. The insides of the pages are actually green and the outsides are white. But there's a kind of seepage of the color through the pages, because the paper is really quite exquisite. And the postcards are tucked inside, and there's also another element that is hidden in the folds, and that's the Chinese translations of the texts. There is this sense of discovery and the sense that there are hidden elements in the story. And you read about a husband who has been killed for his politics, but you're not told why and how. And that sets things up for book two.
TiP: What is the relationship between the text, the photographs, and the performative dimension? Because it seems like within that kind of composite reality that you're presenting, that we get a greater truth than if we were just looking at the image or reading the text or seeing them in isolation. Sim: I've been working in this more expanded kind of way for this project especially, because I became sort of frustrated with the inadequacies of photography. I was a writer before I was a photographer, so I've always been fond of text. It goes beyond text in a way. Video and sound are also part of what I do now. All this sort of adds up to give a much more complex and fuller picture. One single medium just doesn't cut it anymore for me. The rigorous research and personal intimate voice in the storytelling remains the same, but I’m also looking at geopolitical issues. The forms of presentation have expanded substantially and evolved. The performative reading is a different kind of storytelling that I've been almost surprised to find how it reaches people in a different way. |
I've been intrigued by the power that a live reading can have on an audience in a space. So, I did it. I came upon the farm quite accidentally in a way. I had been writing letters to my grandfather in my head, because I kind of feel like if he had lived on until I was at least a teenager, I would have gotten on with him really well. I've always been so misunderstood in my own family for the life choices I've made.
I was given a couple of days to prepare a presentation while I was on an artist residency in Amsterdam. I arrived on a Monday, and I was told on a Tuesday that on Thursday at lunchtime, I had to make a presentation to an audience of Dutch people at the film institute, who I assume would know nothing about British Malaya and this war. Everybody knows Vietnam, and the Dutch are very familiar with Indonesia, but I think Malaya is a very remote and forgotten war. How do I tell this complex and remote story to this audience and give them access to the story? I came upon this form of writing a letter from me to my grandfather, and reading it. I wrote the text first, and then I went into my archive and I started to pull pictures to throw over the words. And I found that it really worked. People were really moved. A couple of people were in tears at the end of it. There's something about the live reading of a letter from a granddaughter to her grandfather that touches something in people's hearts and minds that leads them to draw on their own memories of their own family histories. People have come up to me afterwards to share. They would say things like, “That really made me think about the grandmother I lost in the Holocaust.”
People find different points of connection to the story. So I've become interested in the different reach and impact and power the performative has. I'm actually now working to turn that into an hour long performance with a dramaturg, a director, producer, and a crew at the invitation of a theater in Singapore. I'm working towards a 2024 premiere for that.
I was given a couple of days to prepare a presentation while I was on an artist residency in Amsterdam. I arrived on a Monday, and I was told on a Tuesday that on Thursday at lunchtime, I had to make a presentation to an audience of Dutch people at the film institute, who I assume would know nothing about British Malaya and this war. Everybody knows Vietnam, and the Dutch are very familiar with Indonesia, but I think Malaya is a very remote and forgotten war. How do I tell this complex and remote story to this audience and give them access to the story? I came upon this form of writing a letter from me to my grandfather, and reading it. I wrote the text first, and then I went into my archive and I started to pull pictures to throw over the words. And I found that it really worked. People were really moved. A couple of people were in tears at the end of it. There's something about the live reading of a letter from a granddaughter to her grandfather that touches something in people's hearts and minds that leads them to draw on their own memories of their own family histories. People have come up to me afterwards to share. They would say things like, “That really made me think about the grandmother I lost in the Holocaust.”
People find different points of connection to the story. So I've become interested in the different reach and impact and power the performative has. I'm actually now working to turn that into an hour long performance with a dramaturg, a director, producer, and a crew at the invitation of a theater in Singapore. I'm working towards a 2024 premiere for that.
TiP: One of the points that you've talked about is this whole idea of how our approach to understanding reality and the way in which it's visualized is so Western, Eurocentric, and how that's affected perception. Could you talk about this whole Eurocentric, Western-centric approach to documentary reality and reality in general, and how that has in some ways misled us?
Sim: I think we are in a moment globally in the cultural world of trying to address that. First of all, I have to say that I've been complicit in this, because I am an English-speaking, English-thinking Singaporean who's been educated in a system that was very much a colonial legacy in Singapore, and then went on to go to the colonial metropole for higher education and now doing my third degree still in the colonial metropole. So when I did photography, it was always for the most part with Western media outlets and through Western cultural gatekeepers. It's a dilemma for people who come from the non-western world, because there are few and far between cultural institutions, especially in the photography bubble. If you're looking at the fine art world, there are many other possibilities because there's many great museums in Asia, and in the film world as well, there's a lot more recognition for Asian filmmakers. But there has been a long problem in this reliance on the Western perspective, to the extent that even the non-Western storytellers that try to come into their own are judged based on these Western standards.
For example, a person who applies to Magnum, which to get into Magnum is a dream of many photographers, western, non-western, the world over. You have to put yourself before a cooperative or collective of photographers who are very predominantly western. And you have to present something that is intelligible to them and more than that, perhaps suits their taste buds. That's the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy effect. You end up with people who are proficient in these types of visual languages floating to the top, even if they are not from the western world. So that's one dimension of the problem. The other dimension of the problem really is what's been the norm for decades in photography is for Western photographers to parachute into brown and yellow and black people’s places and, to some extent, extract and leave. That's come to define how we understand these places, because these pictures are then carried in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, the National Geographics of the world, the New Yorkers of the world, and by NGOs, so it comes to define what we know of these places. I think this is problematic on many fronts.
Now, efforts try and address this, both in terms of dealing with the historical archives as well as commissioning contemporary representations of the non-Western world. People are beginning to think about these issues. But I think the jury's still out in a way. I will withhold judgment until we really see the results of all these ongoing efforts. It's not unproblematic in that museums and agencies and institutions now are falling over themselves to recruit colored people to their ranks, which in and of itself is a very positive thing. But there's diversity and there’s diversity. I've had my own experiences of being invited to the table, but then finding that some of the other people at the table are not really ready for diversity.
TiP: The idea here is to be diverse is to break through the different structures of hierarchy that exist. You can be invited to the table, but then are people really listening, are people really seeing you as an equal in this dialogue that is happening? And I think that happens on many different levels, on the level of culture, on the level of gender.
Sim: I hate to be the double, triple ticket of the three checkboxes in the room, because I often have to represent that voice at the table at all these meetings. I don't mind because it is the role that I stepped into. It's dawned on me that a lot of especially Southeast Asian photographers look to me as someone who broke through the glass ceiling earlier on. And they take pride and they take heart in the fact that somebody like me made it. And it's inspired not a few Southeast Asian younger women photographers, actually. But from my perspective, there have also been many times when I felt that other people at the table are not ready to truly engage. They may be doing this in a more tokenistic kind of way.
TiP: Different kinds of cultural perspectives are so important.
Sim: A different cultural perspective is crucial when you're looking at an archive. There have been instances where I've looked at certain images in the Imperial Museum's collection on the Malayan war. Obviously, I pick up certain cultural cues about what is in the picture. I would ask the curators there if they had the same understanding of the images, and of course, they don't. So, you have to set different eyes in front of not just reality, but also history, because the interpretations, the contextualization is going to be completely different. With the “Interventions” work, this is what I'm trying to unpack, I'm trying to deconstruct the layers that have gone into what has formed our knowledge of this particular war in Malaya. And I'm trying to look at the indexicality in the colonial archive.
This kind of representation is important for the contemporary reality that we live with, but it's also important to cast those same eyes on the historical stuff that is in our midst, too.
Sim: I think we are in a moment globally in the cultural world of trying to address that. First of all, I have to say that I've been complicit in this, because I am an English-speaking, English-thinking Singaporean who's been educated in a system that was very much a colonial legacy in Singapore, and then went on to go to the colonial metropole for higher education and now doing my third degree still in the colonial metropole. So when I did photography, it was always for the most part with Western media outlets and through Western cultural gatekeepers. It's a dilemma for people who come from the non-western world, because there are few and far between cultural institutions, especially in the photography bubble. If you're looking at the fine art world, there are many other possibilities because there's many great museums in Asia, and in the film world as well, there's a lot more recognition for Asian filmmakers. But there has been a long problem in this reliance on the Western perspective, to the extent that even the non-Western storytellers that try to come into their own are judged based on these Western standards.
For example, a person who applies to Magnum, which to get into Magnum is a dream of many photographers, western, non-western, the world over. You have to put yourself before a cooperative or collective of photographers who are very predominantly western. And you have to present something that is intelligible to them and more than that, perhaps suits their taste buds. That's the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy effect. You end up with people who are proficient in these types of visual languages floating to the top, even if they are not from the western world. So that's one dimension of the problem. The other dimension of the problem really is what's been the norm for decades in photography is for Western photographers to parachute into brown and yellow and black people’s places and, to some extent, extract and leave. That's come to define how we understand these places, because these pictures are then carried in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, the National Geographics of the world, the New Yorkers of the world, and by NGOs, so it comes to define what we know of these places. I think this is problematic on many fronts.
Now, efforts try and address this, both in terms of dealing with the historical archives as well as commissioning contemporary representations of the non-Western world. People are beginning to think about these issues. But I think the jury's still out in a way. I will withhold judgment until we really see the results of all these ongoing efforts. It's not unproblematic in that museums and agencies and institutions now are falling over themselves to recruit colored people to their ranks, which in and of itself is a very positive thing. But there's diversity and there’s diversity. I've had my own experiences of being invited to the table, but then finding that some of the other people at the table are not really ready for diversity.
TiP: The idea here is to be diverse is to break through the different structures of hierarchy that exist. You can be invited to the table, but then are people really listening, are people really seeing you as an equal in this dialogue that is happening? And I think that happens on many different levels, on the level of culture, on the level of gender.
Sim: I hate to be the double, triple ticket of the three checkboxes in the room, because I often have to represent that voice at the table at all these meetings. I don't mind because it is the role that I stepped into. It's dawned on me that a lot of especially Southeast Asian photographers look to me as someone who broke through the glass ceiling earlier on. And they take pride and they take heart in the fact that somebody like me made it. And it's inspired not a few Southeast Asian younger women photographers, actually. But from my perspective, there have also been many times when I felt that other people at the table are not ready to truly engage. They may be doing this in a more tokenistic kind of way.
TiP: Different kinds of cultural perspectives are so important.
Sim: A different cultural perspective is crucial when you're looking at an archive. There have been instances where I've looked at certain images in the Imperial Museum's collection on the Malayan war. Obviously, I pick up certain cultural cues about what is in the picture. I would ask the curators there if they had the same understanding of the images, and of course, they don't. So, you have to set different eyes in front of not just reality, but also history, because the interpretations, the contextualization is going to be completely different. With the “Interventions” work, this is what I'm trying to unpack, I'm trying to deconstruct the layers that have gone into what has formed our knowledge of this particular war in Malaya. And I'm trying to look at the indexicality in the colonial archive.
This kind of representation is important for the contemporary reality that we live with, but it's also important to cast those same eyes on the historical stuff that is in our midst, too.
TiP: What keeps you going? What do you feel is the biggest motivator for you in terms of the work that you do?
Sim: I've always been driven by some kind of sense of purpose. And that has changed over the years. The earlier work was very straight ahead, documentary and didactic. It was very much like, I know about an underreported issue in China, and I'm going to go and report the hell out of it and photograph and film a bloody moving story to make people care. And now it is a bit more subtle, but it's not dissimilar in its ethos. I still feel strongly that, at least with this particular project on Malaya, there are many, many gaps in the historiography of this war, and I think that is a kind of unspoken trauma in these two generations of people from Singapore and Asia, and I think actually the story has resonance in many parts of the world because a lot of countries were involved in decolonization wars and suffered very similar fates.
I hope in unearthing and documenting some of these stories, in bottling them on the one hand, and then using that research to make art from on the other, I can help other people to reflect and think and understand and deal with some of these traumas. To help us understand a little bit of where we came from and why we are where we are and who we are. That sense of purpose is what keeps me going. It's certainly not for making money. The rest of it doesn't really interest me so much. But there's a certain personal pride in wanting to produce the next piece of work that should be better, in making the next exhibition that should be better, and making a next book that should be better. So, there's that dimension of it. But mainly I think it's the sense of purpose.
Sim: I've always been driven by some kind of sense of purpose. And that has changed over the years. The earlier work was very straight ahead, documentary and didactic. It was very much like, I know about an underreported issue in China, and I'm going to go and report the hell out of it and photograph and film a bloody moving story to make people care. And now it is a bit more subtle, but it's not dissimilar in its ethos. I still feel strongly that, at least with this particular project on Malaya, there are many, many gaps in the historiography of this war, and I think that is a kind of unspoken trauma in these two generations of people from Singapore and Asia, and I think actually the story has resonance in many parts of the world because a lot of countries were involved in decolonization wars and suffered very similar fates.
I hope in unearthing and documenting some of these stories, in bottling them on the one hand, and then using that research to make art from on the other, I can help other people to reflect and think and understand and deal with some of these traumas. To help us understand a little bit of where we came from and why we are where we are and who we are. That sense of purpose is what keeps me going. It's certainly not for making money. The rest of it doesn't really interest me so much. But there's a certain personal pride in wanting to produce the next piece of work that should be better, in making the next exhibition that should be better, and making a next book that should be better. So, there's that dimension of it. But mainly I think it's the sense of purpose.
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