On the note of human’s desire for the truth to connect the dots from the past to the present, Wilfred Lim’s WHO (2013) presents a personal account of his visit to his ancestral home in Xiamen. Originally a descendent of Hu, Lim revealed that his great-grandmother remarried a man by the surname of Lim after her move from China to Malaysia, and her children later adopted his surname.
Lim’s grandfather reconnected with his sister and cousins 60 years later in China and continues to visit them to this day. In 2012, Lim travelled with his grandfather to Fujian, China, and documented the different sceneries and scenarios between Malaysia/Singapore and China. Lim also titled the project WHO as a wordplay to represent “Hu” as a way to echo his anxiety about not being able to distinguish his roots.
And for some, authenticity reigns above all life’s uncertainty. nor’s Wedding 2020 (2022) and Navarroza’s Self Portraits and The Tropical Gothic (2019) extend their image-making to reflect on their identity at home in Singapore for the former and the Philippines for the latter.
Wedding 2020 is a romantic re-enactment of nor’s sunrise beach wedding held on the east coast of Singapore. Known to situate their identity and community within speculative timelines through gender performance, ethnographic portraits, and transnational histories, nor weaves dreams and the authentic self as a way to fulfil their prophecy against society’s odds.
In Self Portraits and The Tropical Gothic (2019), Navarroza explores her confusing amalgamation as a Filipino, female, and Asian caught in a syncretic mix of East and West. She renders herself the creator and subject caught in the Philippines’ pastiche as the “Tropical Gothic.” She sees her self-portraits as “a wild pleasure to confront the heavy and tender complexities of Self and Surrounding.”
Closing the exhibition are Ruangkritya’s A Convenient Sunset / A Convenient Holdup (2019) and Sokchanlina’s Urban Street Night Club (2013), where the juxtaposition of the tranquil and properly composed photographs of convenient stores and the use of fencing as a form of concealment (to maintain what Lim refers to as a “backwards-looking collective consciousness that blinds us from the present mechanisms of control”) achieve what Gwen would call “an ephemeral paradise on this earth.”
In my pursuit to seek the answers to whose paradise my ancestors are in search of and how the above works have played a part in my rumination on where and what paradise might entail, whether through scripture, territorial waters, inapt ecological decisions, pollution, colonial legacies, dust, trauma, circumstances, and alternate personal and family narratives, I learnt that paradise is what we make of it, some are made for the present, some are made for the future generations. I don’t think we can ever reconcile the paradox of a paradise, but we can learn to dwell in the uncertainties and know that there are things that are out of our control. We take chances at every decision and take responsibility for our actions, which alone is enough.
Rachel Seah is a doctoral student at the Centre of Chinese Visual Arts in Birmingham School of Art researching on contemporary private photography in East Asia through the gendered lens. Her research is located at the intersection of contemporary art and visual activism with an interest in contemporary photography and media, feminism, care ethics and alternative histories. As a writer and researcher, she strives to advocate for women’s development and emotional well-being through contemporary art research and practice. Previously, she received her MA in Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices at Nanyang Technological University Singapore (2021) and her BA in Fashion Media and Industries at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London (2014).
