So this is what it feels like to be free by John Clang

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JOHN CL ANG

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it feels like

So this is what it feels like to be free

07.01.23 – 04.03.23

About the Artist

The practice of Singaporean visual artist John Clang (b. 1973) often straddles dual realities of global cities, unfettered by confines of time and geography. A double-sight navigator of a world in constant flux, he absorbs seemingly mundane and banal external stimuli and conveys his internal observations and ruminations through the mediums of photography and film.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Singapore Art Museum (2009), National Museum of Singapore (2010), CCC Strozzina, Florence (2014), Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York (2014), Pera Müzesi, Turkey (2018), ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2020), Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2021) and Gajah Gallery, Singapore (2021).

In 2010, he garnered the Designer of the Year award at the President’s Design Award, and remains the first and only photographer to receive this distinguished accolade.

In 2015, Clang earned his Master of Arts Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts in partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2017, he made his first foray into film with Their Remaining Journey, which premiered at the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and garnered a nomination for the festival’s Bright Future Award. He released his second feature, A Love Unknown, in 2020, and most recently his third film Absent Smile, in a world premiere at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2022.

About the Curator

Kong Yen Lin (b. 1987) is a researcher and writer specializing in photography. She earned her Masters in Asian Art Histories at LASALLE College of the Arts, researching on Singapore’s modern photography history from the 1950s to 80s. She is keen on exploring the wider, systemic frameworks governing the history of visual culture in Singapore, in particular the sociopolitical forces which aided photography’s rise to prominence as an art form, and the applications of vernacular photography.

Kindred

affinities Reading and writing the prose of the world

By Kong Yen Lin Being Together Tye family (Paris, Tanglin), 2012

In his enigmatic writings contemplating the relation of literature to time, history and death, Maurice Blanchot (1982) meditates on the concept of negation in Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)’s literary practice, highlighting the constraints of physicality and the limits of sight: “When we look in front of us, we do not see what is behind. When we are here, it is on the condition that we renounce elsewhere. The limit retains us, thrusts us back toward what we are, turns us back towards ourselves, away from the other, makes of us averted beings.” (p.133). He continues to ponder upon the notion of consciousness as a mechanism of transcending our temporal and spatial limits:

Thanks for consciousness, am I not at all times elsewhere from where I am, always master of the other and capable of something else? Yes, it is true, but this is also our sorrow. Through representation we reintroduce into our intimacy with ourselves the constraints of the face-toface encounter; we confront ourselves, even when we look despairingly outside of ourselves. (Blanchot, 1955; trans. 1982, p.134)

Blanchot posits the conundrum of the human condition — wherein we are able to relate only to things when we avert our gazes from them and attain an external stance. The true root of phenomenon is often inaccessible to us; it is only with the parameters of our individual and collective subjectivities that we trace the contours of the known world. However he offers a possible means of transcendence in the form of Rilke’s lyrical notion of “Weltinnenraum”, (world’s inner space) which embraces the intimate sensuality of thought as an extension

of spatial imagination. Known for developing innovative means of evoking interstitial space in his prose, Rilke has often transposed sensorial perceptions and personified objects and spaces in his short prose to intensify the intimacy of inner thought, of turning inwards to the things themselves.

A strong parallel can be seen in John Clang’s unfolding artistic practice over the past decade, which constantly foregrounded an enduring interest in exploring the embodiment of subjective consciousness, and the interplay between interiority and exteriority. Being Together (2010-2012) meditated on the physical and emotive concepts of immediacy and distance within the transnational families amidst globalisation, The Land of My Heart (2014) inscribed longing and desire onto symbolic spaces, while The World Surrounding an Indoor Plant (2016) glimpses into the correlation between the intuitive experience of phenomena, cognition and representation. Clang’s foray into film since 2019 further conjures a universe with narratives often defying limits of chronology and spatiality, a whole closed on itself filled with life that circles around, but then liltingly spins off and disappears.

But perhaps the project which he first sowed the seeds of curiosity on puzzling out one’s future path was Boon Hock in 2014 (2014), which depicted the eponymous character’s monthly geomancy chart mapped using zi wei dou shu (紫微斗数) over a calendar year alongside his mobile phone selfies. The exploration of identity of Boon Hock, a typical salary man in his 40s, an archetypal everyday man, pans out through a collective trio of chronological, visual, and metaphysical means. In concert with an edited prose of

This is called destiny: being face to face and nothing else and always opposite.

— Maurice Blanchot

The Space of Literature

Boon Hock’s daily text messages, a stream of consciousness materialises, tracing an emotional and mental cartography of one man’s everyday existence.

In Sans the Face (2019-ongoing), this examination of identity broadens considerably, to reflect on the increasingly overbearing presence of surveillance and its impact on civil liberties in a frenzied network culture of projection, sharing, duplication and reconstitution. In it, Clang transposes a post-it sticker pasted over his laptop’s web camera as a makeshift privacy shield, to portraits of denizens encountered on the streets in cities around the world. The setup of the photo encounter is part deliberate, part chance. Mirroring the mechanism of surveillance devices, he first seeks out a site of interest and then awaits an opportune individual to surface before inviting them to be photographed. Using a wide angle lens and high depth of field that mimic the fish-eye vistas of surveillance cameras, Clang’s lenses seizes up the smorgasbord of bustling street culture, from foreign domestic workers resting along a pedestrian bridge on their day off, an ocean of bicycles fronting a row of canal houses, to the wood-trimmed interiors of a rail tram.

Yet the everyday here is sequestered in anonymity, nameless, scarcely a face. Masked by squares of coloured paper, the inhabitants of the series resemble glowing screens of endless permutations that constitute the simulacra and simulation endemic of contemporary life. Under the taxonomical gaze of the artist, infinite elements of life have now been atomized into discrete, manageable elements to be collected, shared and saved – a form of visual vocabulary and image-speak responding to a prevailing social syntax. Have these individuals truly transcended objectification and definition or have domination manifested in new guises? This is all the more ambiguous for a consumer-producer class Roberto Simanowski (2018) termed “Generation Like” -- individuals co-opted by the culture and entertainment industry as small-scale

investors, who perceive emancipation and agency as self-expression and branding on social networks (p.60). The cycle of voyeurism and exposure feeds each other ceaselessly. Hence while Sans the Face signifies the ambient awareness of society as a spectacle, it also charts the complex terrain of our fraught struggle between public and private, beholder and participant.

Furthermore, at a staggering volume of close to 150 portraits and counting, the image aggregation intimates what Nathan Jurgenson (2019) observes as “social photography”, a commonplace flow and babble of visual language encompassing not just decisive moments but also trivial, inarticulate fillers. Nonetheless the everyday man seems to have seen everything, but are witnesses to nothing. There is a level of life the street is unable to tear from obscurity, an inkling of yearning and impulse impervious to the most sentient of artificial intelligences. In Reading by an Artist (2023-ongoing), a performance artwork, the act of scrutiny now swerves from the crowd to one’s inner self, to decipher the vagaries of human fate and destiny. Participants are invited to sign up for a birth chart reading by the artist using zi wei dou shu (紫微斗 数), a veritable school of metaphysics and predictive analytics which he has studied and mastered for close to a decade.

If one’s life story can be likened to a book, Clang peruses this narrative of life and death with the humility and curiosity of a scholar, parsing its coded expressions, inferring the nu anced ebbs and flows, while deftly balancing the inner laws and relations of this cosmic entity. Participation is reflexive in this confluence of minds, as audiences actively make meaning out of insights to shape intentionality and action. In a way, this work poses as a heuristic for self-discovery, whereby freedom, in the artist’s opinion, may possibly only originate from ceasing judgment and compensation of one’s constraints, to instead redirecting intensity at one’s strengths. Consisting of one table and two chairs behind a curtain, the openness of the performance’s configuration alludes to

The World Surrounding an Indoor Plant Dementia, 2016

The Land of My Heart Swimming Pool, 2014

the cross-cutting terrain between public and private intersections of the self. It is also worth noting that in the tradition of performance such as Chinese opera, the arrangement of tables and chairs typically serves to delineate different spatialities and environments on stage; two stacked tables may represent a hill, one on its own, a wall for leaping over. Stepping from a chair to a table may symbolise surmounting a terrain, while lone chairs may denote structures like caves or prison. In a contemporary age, the combination of one table and two chairs (一桌二椅) has developed into a conceptual theatrical language for experimentation and innovation, in a way setting the stage for earnest exchange and collaboration for Clang’s artwork.

The leitmotif of theatre carries over in The Mobile Park (2023), manifesting in the form of automobiles parked along quiet roads of the Singapore cityscape, their windows tellingly plastered with newspapers. The series constitutes a witty nod to the exalted genre of the road trip in the likes of William Eggleston and Robert Frank in American photography and William Faulkner and Jack Kerouac in literature, where cars, described somewhat derisively by Faulkner as “individual muscles, bones and flesh of a new and legless kind” (Carey, 1974) personify progress, power and freedom. Autonomy in The Mobile Park , however, takes the shape of libidinal urges, recasting the social phenomenon of nineties Singapore where such lone cars double up as sites for clandestine, passionate pursuits onto staged tableaus. Against the backdrop of a tightly controlled social sphere and a communitarian order prioritising utilitarian needs of the collective over individual desires, the automobile offers an avenue for momentary escape, a corporeal recourse to psychological alienation. Suffused with strobe lighting, the images are redolent of Weegee’s lurid and voyeuristic tabloid-style photography.

However, Clang’s artworks are not meant to correlate neatly to any specific period or

series of events. They are instead narratives of an inner journey and a primordial way of facing up to a reality of nature that prevails a lifetime despite tectonic shifts in the world. His photographic language evinces his overarching objective as an artist: the outward expression of an inner life, resonating with Rilke’s belief that “it falls to the artist to make one thing out of many and out of the smallest part of a thing to make a world”. This is a fitting undertaking, considering how despite the massive growth in technologies to grasp and define, the everyday unfailingly eludes. To quote Blanchot, “[The everyday] escapes. It belongs to insignificance, and the insignificant is without truth, without reality, without secret, but perhaps also the site of all possible signification”. (Kaplan and Ross, 1987, p.14)

In the present day, where there is a relentless blurring of thresholds between photographs and metadata, a tussle between the seemingly utopian maintenance of a right to privacy versus unbridled over-sharing, sense-making through art has become ever more salient. The world that is present in Clang’s images, as though glimpsed through a door left ajar, is often achingly cognizant of its brevity and solitude. Fluid, porous and evanescent, it evokes a contemporary condition that Zygmunt Bauman termed “liquid modernity”, as opposed to a previous production-driven, “solid”, hardware-focused era. Under such systemic provisions, a durable identity that coalesces over time and space is untenable; we may inevitably cede the understanding of ourselves as “pilgrims” in search of deeper meaning, to assume the guises of “tourists” or grazers seeking multiple but fleeting social experiences. Clang’s alternate readings of identity’s mercurial nature as it plays out in visual culture is hence an invitation for us to reassess and rethink the perception of the self and the other, while answering to an innate desire to live an experience as authentic as permissible.

Absent Smile, 2022

Sans the Face

(2019 — ongoing)

Throughout history, the ability to see as far as the eye desires is deemed a mystical power accorded to divinity. In today’s dominant network culture, digital surveillance has progressively supplanted optical vision. Its pathological omnipresence of decrypting, filtering and pattern recognition, has ensnarled humanity in a complex web of the watcher or the watched, where both co-exist in uneasy complicity. One such device which has permeated daily life is the ubiquitous web camera, a lifeline to connection and intimacy for many during moments of isolation in the recent Covid-19 pandemic, but also a possible encroachment to personal privacy and confidentiality.

Inspired by a post-it sticker slapped over the lens of his laptop’s web camera as a make-shift cover, the artist re-appropriates the stationery as a symbol of playful obliteration, calling to mind the pixilated mosaic obliterating visages of people or gestures deemed inappropriate. Turning the gaze of the web camera onto itself, he invited anonymous strangers encountered spontaneously on the streets to select an oversized post-it of their preferred colour and pose for a portrait with it obscuring their faces.

Defying identification, these individuals transmute into partial blank slates wherein infinite alternative personas proliferate, liberating them momentarily from the milieus they were ensconced within. Through consistent, systemic documentation, a typology of anonymity gradually emerges, akin to a protest against the voluminous surveillance footage gathered to analyse and prescribe human behaviour, without our agency and against our interests. Has the camera, and by extension photography, not only extended the human eye prosthetically but subsumed our capacity for being human? Have we truly come as far as we can see?

The Mobile Park (2023)

Film, literature and popular culture are replete with representations of cars as an emblem of power, privilege and modernity, endowing their owners with the freedom to traverse both socioeconomic and geographical confines. In the Singaporean context, owning one’s set of wheels has not only become an indispensable criteria to fulfilling the Singapore Dream; it is also valuable territory for a momentary escape from the pressures of life. The Mobile Park which plays upon the dual meanings of a parking lot or a recreation ground on the move, is a series exploring automobiles as a quick-fix release valve for the undercurrents of carnal desire humming beneath a highly circumscribed existence. It features staged photos reconstructing lurid affairs playing out within stationary cars parked at deserted spots, with windows plastered with newspapers for privacy — a common phenomenon sighted in the eighties and nineties. Illuminated with strobe lights, these images appear bare and exposed, mirroring the air of quiet desperation in an era wherein private passions took a backseat to utilitarian goals, and when every bid for space and privacy is a desperate, hard-fought battle.

Reading by an Artist

(2023 — ongoing)

Amidst the terse relay between eye, mind, body and machine, the vagaries of human fate and destiny seem to be the last-standing frontier that have eluded the effacing grasp of digital decoding and artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, countless ancient systems of knowledge have drawn upon philosophy, astronomy and metaphysics in an attempt to distill the fundamental nature of reality and principles of being. The artist, for one, views human destiny as an epic codex not just simply to be perused, but to be interpreted and translated into tangible action to empower one’s life.

In this performance artwork, the artist embodies his search for meaning, purpose and identity by adopting the technique of zi wei dou shu (紫微斗数), a metaphysical philosophy dating back to imperial China, to forecast events in the life of invited participants and illuminate insights to challenges. Integrating knowledge from geomancy to Chinese medicine and elements, the approach involves computing charts based on one’s birth timing to intuit interrelationships between various core “palaces” of life such as health, kinship and career.

The readings, conducted in hour-long durations, welcome anyone and everyone seeking advice. Reflecting on dual roles of an artist and visionary in triangulating causality, necessity and possibility, the artwork contemplates on critical junctures where art ceases and life begins. It questions how knowledge gathering through seemingly unconventional routes reconciles with an increasingly contrived reality which is exceedingly scripted and post-produced.

Beyond the simplistic outcome of donning a pair of glasses and watching the world come into focus, literacy in this context for participants extends beyond the textual and visual world, into the realm of the self, in discerning and navigating the path forward for one’s betterment.

References

Baumant, Zygmunt. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity.

Blanchot, Maurice. (1982). The Space of Literature. University of Nebraska Press.

Carey, Glenn O. (1974). William Faulkner On The Automobile As Socio-Sexual Symbol. CEA Critic, 36 (2), 15-17. Retrieved 2 Jan 2023 from https://www.jstor.org/stable/44375820

Cotton, Charlotte, Chao, Marina & Vermare, Pauline. (2018). Public, Private, Secret: On Photography & the Configuration of Self. Aperture/International Center of Photography.

Jurgenson, Nathan. (2019). The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media. Verso Books.

Kaplan, Alice & Ross, Kristin (Eds.). (1988). Everyday Life. Yale University Press.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. (1955). Sämtliche Werke (The Complete Works), 1:690. Insel.

Simanowski, Roberto. (2018). Waste: A New Media Primer (Amanda Demarco & Susan H. Gillespie, Trans.). Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Original work published 2017)

Tobias, Rochelle. (2015). Rilke, Phenomenology, and the Sensuality of Thought. Konturen. Retrieved 2 Jan 2023 from https://journals.oregondigital.org/index.php/konturen/article/ view/3700/3517