White Light and Promises On Susie Wong's My Beautiful Indies and Sean Lee's The Garden
Sean Lee’s The Garden
White light can be seen with regard to its relationship to truth, to unhiddenness, and to liberation. Light is the paint that a photographer uses; collapsing the use and associations of white light in My Beautiful Indies: A Re-reading by Susie Wong, and The Garden by Sean Lee, brings to light complex issues of death, loss and the transcendence from the private lives of both artist. Both artists work within in the real and imagined landscapes. In looking at the differences and similarities of both artistic practices, in my essay I will explore how the range of discipline probes the emotive, conceptual and ideologies of land, the personal, private landscape becomes public. It is certainly apparent that both works carry an emotional baggage from personal histories of both artists. At first glance, the presence of material light within the images illuminates the subject matter; when viewed in sequence, they seem to be alive. By stripping the represented object of colour and allowing white light to assist us into ‘seeing’, Wong’s graphite photographic-based tracings and Lee monochromic photo images direct the viewer’s attention to this state of flux: of memories and actualities, dead and the living, past and present.
Both installation spaces are thoughtfully constructed into a pathway. My Beautiful Indies: A Re-reading ( a parallel event-exhibition of SB 2013) is set in the long and winding Jendela Space at the Esplanade. The act of walking through the ‘river’, guided by the light boxes along the corridors of Jendela Space reminds one of the passing of time down memory lane. Lee’s Garden installation is a labyrinth in the main biennale event at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). Both installations operate by means of a symbolic privatization of the public exhibition space, designed according to the artist's individual narratives.
Like an archivist, Wong methodically organizes and catalogues personal and archival photographs traces (using pencils from 6H to 9B) of places and people that resonate with personal memories, exploring the enigma of her consciousness. Making up the main body of work are sheets of thin paper marked with loose pencil tracings of old and recent photographs of the East Indies, taken during the artist’s travels. In Berger’s essay ‘Drawing Is Discovery’, the act of drawing can be seen as drawing from one’s memory, forcing oneself to discover the contents of his own store of past memories.1 The meticulous act of tracing the archived photographs of the East Indies, ( a place the artists feels a strong attachment to), dissecting the strokes with her “mind’s eye”, forces the artist to look at the photographs and discover details that she has forgotten. Berger in his same essay spoke about drawings as naturally autobiographical, having an ability to contour a time capsule that shelter over the one that draws. The painstaking act of tracing all the more pulls Wong inside the time capsule. However, tracing is repetitive and difficult to repeat and copy with exactitude-similar to the act of recalling memories. Naturally our memories are fluid not static because the brain modifies that memory each time it is recalled; something is added or subtracted as time weans on .
Susie Wong’s Weightlessness (2012)
According to Berger in his 1992 book, Keeping a Rendezvous, photograph serves as a surrogate for lost memories in the passing of time, “to remind us of what we forget.” The photographs of the East Indies are essentially a private work and reveals intimate personal knowledge and lived experience of a place. Wong traveled extensively across Java in the late 1980s, and for three 3 years, made the highlands of West Java her home. Wong’s love of the rustic was the reason she moved and took solace in the natural landscape. Wong’s nostalgic drawings of the East Indies with mountains, paddy fields and the sea recalls Mooi Indies paintings reference to the photographic documentation that formed part of a colonial survey of the exotic land. As Wong’s landscapes drawings are both actual and imagined, presented to look like a documentation of holiday photographs, the artist illuminates a fantastical colonial gaze of the “other”- the Javanese landscape- using the brilliant white light to glorify the exoticism of these landscapes. The emanated light source produces a remarkable uninterrupted space of an otherworldly contemplation, illuminating otherwise ordinary landscapes traces.
The idea of how light offers a promise of a new start; “Weightlessness” was made in response to the grief of the loss of the artist’s father in entire body of work.
“Weightlessness” (2012) made from five pencil-tracings of the artist’s late father’s movements, each movement depicted on each light box. In each frame of the enlarged drawings (94 cm X 127 cm), Wong’s ghastly father turns to face the spectacle eyeball-to-eyeball, and consequently turns his back again to take his perennial departure. Placing the drawings on large light boxes, Wong allows the light to filter through the delicate, translucent, paper material and the pencil traces. As light recalls passing through cinematic reels, the filtered light boxes on “Weightlessness” reference the study of human movements in Eadweard Muybridge classic photographic studies. Just like Eadweard Muybridge’s obsessive study of detailed animal movements, Wong’s drawings of her late
Susie Wong Weightlessness (2012)
father in the similar fashion brings her ‘closer to the object’ in the words of Berger (Berger 1992). Wong’s translucent images, make apparent by the light boxes, brings the artist’s personal memories into real-time through the viewers active mind. By re-tracing the ‘traced’, as Sontag in ‘On Photography’ mentioned photography as not only an image but also a trace stenciled off from the real. Wong makes claims to the memories of the land and her late father, otherwise dead, photography like a death mask, traces the image-subject into her own unique mark making. In On Photography, Sontag sees photography as a form of acquisition and freezing ‘another person’s mortality’- as surrogate possession of cherished people or things or a way of ‘acquiring’, ‘controlling’ and ‘slicing out this moment and freezing’ events. Wong’s act of reclaiming the subjects from her memories can be seen as an act of re-claiming and tussling against the loss and dememorization, in order to keep the subjective more alive. The process of tracing the enlarged image of a departed loved one, slows down and marks the process of looking, conjures a powerful emotional reaction in the artist and the
viewers. Light is an essential part of Wong’s aesthetic, permeating and becoming embodied in the paper material, producing the fragile and translucent details of tracings of the body of a frail old man. The sensitive use of material communicates the quiet struggle with the power (or failure) of memory and personal loss in the chamber space that the light creates. The use of light in Wong’s drawings opens the door for the dichotomy of memories and actualities, dead and the living, past and present, the interiors and the exteriors, the corporeal (body) and the ephemeral. Light acts as a metaphysically present the ghost of the artist’s late father, outlining the mysterious unknowns. Wong’s methodological use of light and tracing both reveal and conceal a mysterious intimate emotional domain of the artist. And subsequently, through Wong’s process of working, we know that it is unlikely she will ‘re-visit’ the subject matter again; in the words of Berger, Wong has “crossed your (her) subject as though it were a river, have put it behind you (her).”
Similarly in Lee’s The Garden, in which the artist photographs detailed –almost discomfiting – close-ups of his parents’ aging bodies that evokes imaginary landscapes not based on real place, set as a melancholic reminder of mortality. Lee uses white light to conjures up the unknowns beyond the brilliant white light often cited from survivals of OBE (out-of-body-experience). A massive illuminated wall confronts the spectator as he walks towards the installation. The white light is both use in Wong and Lee’s installation to diminish the boundaries between reality and the metaphysical realm. Light makes things visible; but too much light can blind. The blindness of the unknown is Lee’s brilliance of possibilities. The white light throws open the doors for Lee to confront mortality by re-imagining of the metamorphosis of the body. Lee’s work is made intimate with the close up shots of Lee’s corporeal subjects of his aging parents. The title of Lee’s work and the subject matter adopts the pattern of ecological cycle- the burial of the dead is seen as an act of sowing, from which another life occurs. Consequently, the illuminated brings forth questions of life’s continuity: after death, life before existence. As we look at these other-worldly, yet familiar corporeal forms in the series of photographic print, we have no other choice but to think about how one re-imagines death and birth of the flesh. The white light in Lee works subject itself as a pilgrimage towards the strange world of utopia: the utopian imagination represents Lee’s a means to envision new possibilities for the aging body, a better world, and a perfected place set against the imperfect of the present.
The manifestation of light reveals the inner world of both artists; this is how light makes manifest: the illumination of these profound personal experience illumination of self. White light in the works of both artists bears undeniably bears transcendental nodes, its revealing and immaterial power which echoes Genesis portrayal creation as being brought into existence solely by the power of God’s spoken word. “And God said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). Light bears a certain kinship to the divine. The ambiguity of light’s reflects its
mysterious yet primary role within the works of the artists. Light as a positive symbol is so prevalent in biblical Hebrew that redemption, truth, justice, peace, and even life itself "shine," and Lee’s and Wong’s self- revelation is expressed with the use of light. “light acts instead...like a drive that has its own”says Laruelle (Laruelle 1991) in response to the light which sets the agenda instead of philosophy or photography. In both works, light remains to a certain degree in itself. It does not lose its identity in an object firmly assist us into seeing the intrinsic subject matter in both works.
Sean’s Lee powerful wall of white light and Susie’s pathway of light point towards the concept of phototropism, organism’s instinctive attraction to light. It is the fundamental attraction that humans follow the brightest path as studies have show. Just like moths to a flame, we drift towards areas of brightness, attracted to light. This unconscious desire towards light is significant because it is instinctual. In embodying illumination in the works, Susie highlights our instinctive longing to reconcile with the yearning of remembering and holding on- the illumination of self to make light of living. Lee’s close-up images of his parents’ aging bodies undresses the passing of time manifest in the human flesh. The white light in Lee works subject itself as a pilgrimage towards the strange world of utopia. The utopian imagination represents Lee’s a means to envision new possibilities for the aging body concerned with the imagination of a better world, and a perfected society set against the imperfect of the present. The pilgrimage ethos in artists’s installation is surfaced from issues of mortality. At the same time, the imaginations of the unknown conjure up the idea of the afterlife- the life beyond the brilliant white light.
Edmund Burke mentioned that the sublimity of light and its ability to convey the power of the otherworldly, lay in its intimate and contradictory relationship to darkness. Similarly for both artist, the light that illuminate the darkness, the loss and the anxieties, is the vehicle for this otherworldliness; a philosophical light. Lee and Wong images addresses this state of transition between the inner and the outer, the familiar and the strange, and immaterial and the real. Both artists have chosen to work with light to achieve this state of flux: of memories and actualities, dead and the living, past and present, the interiors and the exteriors, the corporeal (body) and the ephemeral.
The photographs and the pencil works do more than document the past, they provide a “new way of dealing with the present” (Sontag 2001)- with the assistance of light to ‘see’ and to ‘imagine’ beyond the physical, in essence a new way of documenting, reflecting upon, mediating and experiencing reality. Light is the paint that a photographer uses; the added use of white light suggests an offer to a promise of a new start.
Bibliography Berger, John . "John Berger: Drawing is discovery." John Berger: Drawing is discovery. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2013. <http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/ art-and-design/2013/05/drawing-discovery?quicktabs_most_read=1>.
Berger, John. "How Fast Does It Go?" Keeping a Rendezvous. New York: Vintage, 1992. N. pag. Print.
Sontag, Susan. "The Image World." On Photography. New York: Picador, 2001.Print.
François Laruelle, “A Light Odyssey: La découverte de la lumière comme problème théorique et esthétique” (Poitiers: le Confort Moderne, 1991), Print.