In the last couple of years, Singaporean visual art institutions have begun to leave their
mark on the region with home-curated exhibitions. Whereas even a decade agomost
visual art shows offering works of more than purely parochial appeal were
imported - foreign curator, foreign art, foreign-made catalogue - with the only
local contribution being the money, the city-state's museums are now taking
more initiative. The National Museum of Singapore is amongst several local
institutions increasingly organising its own shows.
In the wake of rising regional interest in art photography, a new
specialist magazine, PhotoArtAsia, was launched in Bangkokat the end of
2008; new photography events are being initiated all over Southeast Asia, and
private art galleries are focusing more extensively on the medium with
Singapore's National Museum inaugurating its Season of Photography in
October 2008. Timed to coincide with the city's first Singapore International
Photography Festival (SIPF), a biennial manifestation organised by a dynamic
cooperative of local artists, the National Museum's maiden Season presented a
trio of high-calibre shows from two continents. The first of these was
aretrospective of the Mexican master Pedro Meyer. The second featured
recentvideo portraits by the mythic American choreographer and
multi-disciplinary artist Robert Wilson. The third, probably the most striking
of the three and co-curated by the museum, was a tightly assembled exhibition
of work by Taiwanese Magnum photographer Chang Chien-Chi.
The National Museum of Singapore - at its core a history museum - with
its natural affinity for photography and film as documentary tools
indispensable for the telling of history, was an obvious setting for Chang's
work. Chang Chien-Chi, like so many photographic artists, is a
photo-journalist, his images' narrative content heightened by its originality
of aesthetic, and conversely, its visual impact increased by its poignant,
real-life subject-matter.
Put together by Chang in collaboration with National Museum of Singapore
curator Wong Hwei Lian, Doubleness: Photography of Chang Chien-Chi
assembled three of the photographer's most celebrated thematic series in the
artist's first solo survey outside his native Taiwan. Installed in the museum's
vast underground gallery, the show's hushed, hermetic feel had as much to do
with the series' focused emotional register as their basement locus. Though
spotlighting three thematically and aesthetically distinct sets of images, the
exhibition's unifying thread was undoubtedly the photographer's
humanity,Chang's pathos for his subjects palpable throughout.
Opening theshow was Double Happiness (2003-2005), a 66-photograph
narrative sweep shot in black and whitedocumenting a Hanoi marriage-arrangement
business that orchestrates matrimonialunion between men from developed-nation
Taiwan, and women from developingVietnam. The piece is both sociological and
voyeuristic in flavour, itsexamination of the rich world/poor world dichotomy
something of aphotojournalistic standard. Yet beyond social commentary, the
series presents asubtly layered array of emotional and human subtexts - fear,
disappointment,curiosity, ambition, frailty, absurdity, despair, abandonment -
all highlylegible on the subjects' faces, bride and groom. So intimate is the
piece thatsome in Hanoi have criticised the photographer for his apparent
invasion ofprivacy, many of the Vietnamese women photographed ashamed of their
marriagepact and not particularly keen to have it immortalised in print. Yet in
hisdefence, through his lens the artist communes with each of his subjects and
assuch returns to them the dignity they feel they have lost with their
arrangedunion. Bittersweet, Double Happiness is unlike so many
photographic essays that in merely documenting humantravesty, presume to assume
the status of art. Here instead, by nakedlyportraying these men and women's
tentative dance with fate, Chang communicatesa deeply felt pathos for both the
protagonists and their incongruous situation,so creating a unique work of art
beyond surface description.
Aligned face-up on a waist-level shelf, the images of Double Happiness
were designed toreference a conveyor belt trundling the product (manufactured
and packagedmatrimonial alliance) out at regular intervals. Though forced and
on theliteral side, the display's conceit did not detract from the photographs'
visual and thematic impact.
More potent still was Chang's spectacular 1998 The Chain.
Deservedly iconic, the internationally shown and acclaimed group records mental
patients interned in a Taiwanese asylum that, though known as the Long Fa Tang
Buddhist temple, has little to do withfaith or religion. The 45 grainy black
and white prints are nearly human inscale and portraying the asylum's male
patients in pairs, bound together by aniron chain, are iconographically
arresting even before one delves into their expressive singularity.
As asuccession of similar images, The Chain is visually intense, the
viewer sensing Chang's urgency as he shot the series in the briefest of single
sessions. Using formal repetition to effect, Chang captures the similarly
dressed subjects frontally, all adopting more or less the same standing pose.
At first glance the study explores only the small variations of posture and
expression afforded by the limited confines of a life lived in chains. A
strange transcendence lies under the portraits' surface however, Chang's essay
of universal resonance asit evokes the tension and deft balance that exist
between dependence and power,love and hate, trust and distrust, connection and
alienation as embodied by allthese couples. Indeed, it is the familiarity and
candour of these men's faces,even with their half-dazed, sometimes-crazed
expressions, that strike a chord and makes the work moving. The series'
oppressive installation, the images squashed against each other in a closed,
deliberately claustrophobic darkened square space, further served to heighten
its impact.
The show's third work, China Town, shot in colour and black and
white, told the story of Asian economic migration from the perspective of both
the immigrants, and those left behind inChina's Fujian province. Split into two
parts, China Town on the one hand depicts the impoverished men who have left
rural China for a new life of ill-paid blue-collar labour in New York City's
shabby China Town. These mensend their meagre pay-cheques home to provide for
their family in absentia. The second part of the essay, shot in colour,
illustrates relatively comfortable family life in Fujian, minus the absent
migrant-worker-provider parent. Shotover a sixteen-year period (from the early
1990s when Chang was living in the United States, until now), this is a tender
work, the images, particularly the earlier black and white New York sequences,
drawing the viewer into the workers' harsh reality with a combination of
intimacy and an elegantly seductive play of planes, perspectives and
frame-cuts. Neither sentimental or voyeuristic, Chang's two-sided vision of
China Town, though photographed atclose emotional and physical range, with
Chang as insider rather than outsider, succeeds, paradoxically, for the
psychological space and dignity it accords its subjects.
Doubleness, Magnum photographer Chang Chien-Chi's first survey
exhibition outside Taiwan, was an important home-produced exhibition for Singapore's
still young National Museum. With this manifestation alone, the Museum's new
Season of Photography is off to an excellent start, making a significant
contribution to Asian photography in Asia and beyond.
Iola Lenzi
Doubleness:
Photography of Chang Chien-Chi was at the National Museum of Singapore
from 10 October 2008 until 4 January 2009
