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Essay for the exhibition brochure for Unauthorised Medium (curated by Annie Jael Kwan), Framer Framed, 16 Sep – 18 Nov 2018
Immediation, 2019
In The Remnants of Images, Hu Jieming approaches the past with partially animated photographs from family albums, news archives and the Internet. The images are displayed on glass screens of various sizes and stored in aged metallic filing cabinets and lockers that speak of the institutional facet of memory production. As the motorized drawers of the cabinets open and close and the animations mobilize the seemingly still photographs, the installation invites the visitor into a space where the past that evades accurate representations gives itself up for “immediations of memory.” Here, we argue, the installation invites the viewer to engage with the liveliness of a past that we may or may not be familiar with.
Immediation, 2019
Online catalogue of exhibition Memories of the Unseen, 2018
The essay is published for exhibition of Akiq AW, Jim Alen Abel and Wimo Bayang, at A+ Kuala Lumpur, 2018. The exhibition explores the imaginary and performative contexts of "invisibility". While the term "unseen" may refer to something like an invisible spirit, this word can also be discussed in the framework of an ever-haunting memory. The notion of the unseen-something of contradiction in the realm of the visual arts-challenges us to consider different layers of meaning than those immediately given to us by our visual senses. In this context, the unseen encourages new visual interpretations grasped from the processes of editing, magnifying, juxtaposing and deleting. In a world where visual images and simulacra predominate social life, it is crucial to develop and sustain a critical awareness of how images not only function but overwhelm. Juxtaposing the seen and unseen, reversing the established semiotic meanings of visual symbols, or raising questions on how images are showcased, are what artists, especially photographers, often do as a means of subverting the status quo. The three artists in Memories of the Unseen are keen to bring this duality into specific sociocultural contexts-the localities where an image originally emerged, or the period when an image was born, or the cultural field where an image fights against established meanings.
The Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun (1928 – 2007) made works that do and do not look like the Western abstract paintings that now belong firmly within the canon of modern art. Seeking to locate them within a ‘grand narrative’ – however globalised - is fraught with difficulties. I argue that while it is important to recognise both the local cultural influences informing Yun’s practice and their debt to Western art, to describe his paintings within the discourse of ‘hybridity’ is to fail to recognize how visual art works such as Yun’s resist discursive analysis. I apply the cognitive blending theory of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, arguing that Yun’s paintings, like many other postcolonial art works, can more fruitfully be understood as ‘blended emergent structures’.
Memory Studies 14.1, 2021
This article examines the role of the creative arts in renegotiating the border between memorable and unmemorable lives. It does so with specific reference to the (un)forgetting of the colonial soldiers in European armies during World War One. Focussing on the role of aesthetic form in generating memorability, it shows how the creative use of a medium can help redefine the borders of imagined communities by commanding the attention of individual subjects and hence providing conditions for a cognitive and affective opening to the memory of strangers. It concludes that future studies of transformations in collective memory should take a multiscalar approach which takes into account both the shifting social frameworks of memory and the small changes that occur in the micro-politics of viewing and reading.
Twenty-seven years after her family flees to America from Vietnam as refugees of the war, Thi Bui gives birth to her son, leading her to revisit her relationship to the war through the stories and memories of her parents. In an attempt to reconcile her identities as a daughter, a refugee, and a mother, Bui recounts her family’s history by creating a visual narrative, using a combination of her parents’ recollections, her own memory, and drawn reproductions of source family and war photographs. For Bui and her family, six Vietnamese refugees among thousands, photographs served not simply as proof of identity, but as proof of existence. By reproducing instead of including the photographs themselves, Bui establishes a conflict with this notion of existence, reflecting a sense of displacement as a Vietnamese refugee caught between two countries, as well as examining the unreliability of her own memories. Intersecting theories of comics studies, Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural hybridity, and Susan Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s writings on photography, this paper analyzes the role of photography in relationships between personal memory and collective memory, family history and cultural history.
The Third Script (Pearl Lam Galleries-Singapore), curated by David H.Y. Chan, comprises my site-specific installation, "Mnemonic Archiving: a Dispersive Monument," and the works of Singapore filmmaker Boo Junfeng. The catalogue is a full documentation of the concept of the works and individual components
Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, 2013
(RE)MEDIATION_S 2000-2010, 2012
Written for "(RE)MEDIATION_S 2000-2010", a retrospective volume on the work of New Media artist, Michael Takeo Magruder, published by Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery in 2012, this brief, illustrated article explores a number of works in which can be seen a "fascinating, triangular relationship between contemporary arts practice, emerging visualisation technologies and historical materials". Works such as "Monolith[s]" (2006), "Rhythmic Space(s)" (2007), "The Vitruvian World" (Takeo/Baker/Steele, 2008), "Data Double" (2009) and "Vanishing Point(s)" (Takeo/Denard, 2010) re-imagine and transform overtly ‘historical’ or ‘pre-historical’ artefacts; materials from past eras are deformed, juxtaposed and blended in unexpected ways, providing experiences in time and space in which past and present collide in images, sounds and interactions rooted equally in the real and the simulated; they meditate on the future of the past in the memory cultures of cyberspace-era societies, where physical and virtual lives are ineluctably conjoined by operating systems, augmented reality devices and virtual worlds. Multi-layered artefacts from the distant past jostle against and merge with those of the digital present revealing suggestive connections and uncanny disconnections, and rendering past and present simultaneously familiar and strange to each other and to us.
Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 2022
Review of Mihaela Mihai (2022) Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance.
International Journal of Social Science, Management and Economics Research
De la spelunca à la roca: l'habitat troglodytique …, 2006
V Workshop SISMED dei dottorandi in Storia medievale, 2023
African Research Review, 2010
Revista Linguagem, Educação e Sociedade -LES, 2024
Internet Archaeology, (36). doi:10.11141/ia.36.5, 2014
Database of Religious History, 2018
Études romanes de Brno, 2022
Antichi reperti in mostra alla Biblioteca Civica di Verona, 2013
Hitit sosyal bilimler dergisi, 2024
International Journal of Construction Management, 2019
The Journal of Supercritical Fluids, 2009
Egyptian Journal of Chemistry, 2018