MAIN

EXHIBITION
DOCUMENTING
AS METHOD
PHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
CURATOR: ZHUANG WUBIN

This exhibition proposes a renewed focus on documenting as method in art

making. Featuring works created from 1958 to the present moment,
the 13 artists from Southeast Asia selected here approach documenting as
method in three overlapping ways: documenting as looking and thinking;
documenting as cataloguing; documenting as world-making.
In parallel and diverging ways, they use photography as an embodied and
embedded medium to experience realities or to create fantasies.
 ABOUT
Our understanding of photography in Southeast Asia is inflicted by the
reductive binary of photography versus art, which morphs into the other
binary of straight photographers versus artists who use photography. This is
modernism’s last laugh,1 cultivating these binaries that have been inherited
by many art historians, curators and artists in the region. In Family Snaps:
Photography in Southeast Asia, the previous exhibition that I curated for
Chiang Mai City Arts & Cultural Centre on November 2014, I argue that it is
more productive to think of photographic practices as embedded in the
milieus that the practitioners operate, shaped by ideas and visuals that
circulate locally and globally, and marked by personal desires and creative
decisions.2

Documenting as Method: Photography in Southeast Asia, which is curated

for the inaugural edition of Chiang Mai Photo Festival 2015, operates from
the same dialectic. It proposes a renewed focus on the process of
documenting as a productive means to move beyond these reductive
binaries, which have resulted in the amnesia of many practitioners from this
region, at least since the 1950s. Ironically, it is not as though contemporary
artists in Southeast Asia have stopped using documenting as one of their
strategies in art making. While some are lauded for doing so, with their
imaginative work rapidly canonised as contemporary art, others are
castigated as mere photojournalists for mobilising the medium in similar
ways. This double standard is reproduced through the reductive binaries
and distracts us from more pertinent questions, including: how should a
practitioner utilise the medium’s “still-powerful capacity to speak about
events in the world without reproducing, in the infrastructure of one’s own
work, the very political inequities one wants to contest”?3 While not all
practitioners strive to contest political inequities in their work, it is
undeniable that photography continues to o er an egalitarian means to
reflect upon our immediate environment. It is this sense of democracy that
spooks art historians, curators and artists to perpetuate the reductive
binaries.

1Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, “Introduction: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art,” in The
Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl (Berlin/
New York: Sternberg Press/Center for Curatorial Studies, 2009), 12-13.

2 A digital version of the catalogue can be found at https://www.academia.edu/9417256

/Exhibition_catalogue_for_Family_Snaps_Photography_in_Southeast_Asia_2014_.

3Geo rey Batchen, “Looking Askance,” in Picturing Atrocity: Photography in Crisis, ed. Jay Prosser et al. (London:
Reaktion Books, 2012), 233.
By proposing Asia as method in cultural studies, theorist Chen Kuan-Hsing
hopes that “societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference,
so that the understanding of the self may be transformed, and subjectivity
rebuilt”.4 Through the “constant inter-referencing and the dialectic of
comparison” amongst cultural workers in Asia,5 we may begin to develop
locally grounded understandings of history and culture, knowledge that
makes no automatic claims on universalism.6 It is in this spirit of “constant
inter-referencing” my peers in Southeast Asia that I propose documenting
as method. Here, I conceive documenting as an evolving and contested
process that is not merely the dispassionate recording of reality. Instead, I
wish to gesture towards documenting as an embedded and embodied
process.

In the parallel and diverging ways in which they use photography in their
practices, the work of the 13 artists featured here mark the possibilities of
documenting as method. The selection features bodies of work made from
1958 to the present moment. In this text, I wish to tease out at least three
overlapping ways to approach the idea of documenting as method, namely:
documenting as looking and thinking, documenting as cataloguing, and
documenting as world-making.

The first interpretation comes via a quote from Cambodian artist Vandy
Rattana (b. 1980, Phnom Penh) who notes that documenting is the “repeat
cycle of looking and thinking”.7 It is while shooting Walking Through
(2008-09), included in this exhibition, when Vandy first stumbled upon a
bomb pond at the Kampong Cham countryside. The image haunted him,
compelling his frantic reading into Cambodian history. He learnt that these
craters resulted from the bombings that coincided with the American War in
Vietnam, when America dropped over 2.7 million tons of bombs across
Cambodia. The “repeat cycle of looking and thinking” about the
mismanagement of Cambodia’s rubber resources in Walking Through
triggers Vandy’s recuperation of his country’s historical scars in Bomb
Ponds (2009), his most celebrated series thus far.

4Chen Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010),
212.

5 Chen, Asia as Method, 252.

6 Chen, Asia as Method, 245.

7Gridthiya Gaweewong, “Interview: Gridthiya Gaweewong & Vandy Rattana,” in Phnom Penh: Rescue
Archaeology, ed. Erin Gleeson, Barbara Barsch and Ev Fischer (Berlin and Stuttgart: Institute for Foreign Cultural
Relations, 2013), 109.
A quick digression here: Writing about African photography, Okwui Enwezor
characterises the shift from the modern to the contemporary as the
evolution from depiction to observation, a shift from the dialectical to the
analytical.8 I wonder if this shift is also the result of art workers in the
contemporary era finding more sophisticated words to contextualise
photography. Certainly for the likes of Rong Wong-savun (1932-2009, b.
Chai Nat, Thailand) and Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah (1907-79, b. Kuala
Terengganu, Malaysia) featured in this exhibition, their documenting
practices in the 50s and the 60s constitute embodied experiences of the
milieus that they found themselves in. Their works are dialectical, as much
as they are analytical.

The same can be said of the artistic practice of Chua Chye Teck (b. 1974,
Singapore) who often notes the need to analyse his photographs in order to
realise his concerns. Photography is not merely a recording tool but an
enabling medium to make visible his concerns as a human being.9 We may
also approach the works of Chua and Shah featured here in relation to
documenting as cataloguing. Chng Seok Tin (b. 1946, Singapore), on the
other hand, often uses the camera to document her installations and to
create source imageries for her printmaking work. In this show, she presents
one of her contact prints, which resulted from her cataloguing of her Hand
Sculpture Series (1978). Reading the work retrospectively, Chng feels that it
captures the sense of emancipation in her move as an art student from a
relatively conservative environment in Singapore to one of the centres of
western modernism in UK. She parallels the archiving of her artworks, which
no longer exist, with the documentation of performance art by performance
artists.10 In the laborious process of documenting, defacing and re-surfacing
that informs Deadline (2011), Toh Hun Ping (b. 1978, Singapore) inscribes
every single item in his possession, and then prints and bleaches the
images, before re-scanning and sequencing the visuals into a one-hour
video. The abridged version is presented here.

We may certainly extend Toh’s cataloguing into the idea of collecting. Hoo
Fan Chon (b. 1982, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), for example, collects found
photographs of female nightclub entertainers of the 1980s in Karma Karma
Chameleons (2014- ) to recuperate the modernity of fashion that has
always circulated between East Asia, Malaysia and the West. In Searching
for Identity Series; Bottle #1 (2002-07), Po Po (b. 1957, Pathein, Myanmar)

8 Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography (New York/Göttingen:
International Center of Photography/Steidl Publishers, 2006), 28.

9 Chua Chye Teck, interview by author, Singapore, December 23, 2014.

10 Chng Seok Tin, interview by author, Singapore, December 31, 2014.

extrapolates Cubism into photography. Po Po notes that an object’s identity
has less to do with form. Instead, it is the di erent aspects of the object,
which we readily recall in mind, that define its identity.11 In this work, the
process of collecting occurs during his meticulous documenting of the
bottle at di erent angles, positions and time. In the case of Pramuan
Burusphat (b. 1953, Bangkok, Thailand), he has been creating imageries of
a self-referential nature since 1978, often using items that he has collected
over the decades to visualise his personal life. I often think of
Autobiographical Images (1978- ) as an attempt by Burusphat to re-
imagine and re-live parts of his life through art making. His work, and that of
Toh, converges with the idea of documenting as world-making.

There has always been a tendency to understand the act of photography as

an imbalanced power relationship between the photographer and the
helpless sitter. This is a position favoured by critics of photojournalism and
writers dealing with issues of representation. However, since the 1980s,
doubts on the authority of anthropological photographs have led to the re-
evaluation of colonial and anthropological images, prompting us to
reconsider them as collaborative events inflicted by the taste and
expectations of the sitters.12 In her study on studio portraiture in Java,
Karen Strassler notes the preference of Indonesian customers in the 1950s
for colour backdrops, even though it was only possible to produce black-
and-white photographs then. Clearly, the experience of going to the studios
to be photographed is as important as the outcome.13 These examples
suggest that we should consider the act of documenting as opening up an
embodied, performative space for both the photographers and the sitters to
project their desires. Hence, what appears to be a documentary series by
Geric Cruz (b. 1985, Manila) in Second Star to the Right (2012-13) reveals
itself to be an intense collaboration with two brothers at Zambales, Central
Luzon, in which the photographer privileges the authenticity of the
experience by incorporating the wish of his sitters throughout the
documenting and editing process.14 In truth, Cruz shares the same sense of
vulnerability that Nguy n Qu c Thành (b. 1970, Hanoi) feels, vis-à-vis the
soldiers whom he photographs in A Soldiers’ Garden (2012). Expressing
their unease over the fame and heroism that sometimes accompany art
practice and documentary work, both practitioners have been devising

11 Po Po, interview by author, Yangon, Myanmar, April 2008.

12 Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 116.

13Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2010), 88.

14 Geric Cruz, Skype interview by author, January 11, 2015.

ways to temper with the relationship between the photographer and the
sitter. However, as I have intimated, it is important not to conceive this
power relationship in overly deterministic terms. A Soldiers’ Garden is as
much a projection of Nguy n’s fantasies on these young soldiers as his
sitters performing their adulthood for the camera. Nevertheless, it is their
sense of uncertainty that drives Nguy n and Cruz to doubt and evolve their
documenting practices, instead of doing what is more common in
Southeast Asia amongst some of their peers, which is to uncritically
replicate the aesthetic and ideatic templates valorised by Euramerican
exhibitions and competitions.

In The War Within (2012), Noi Satirat Damampai (b. 1982, Hadyai, Thailand)
approaches documenting as a method to create a dream-like encounter,
which serves to evoke the state-of-mind of the photographer and the
displaced Karen people whom she met along the Thai-Myanmar border. In
CORPUS; Innermemories (2012-13), Deden Hendan Durahman (b. 1974,
Majalaya, Indonesia) uses the analogue technique of multiple-exposure to
collect memories of a particular woman. Through the documenting process,
her body is fragmented into mnemonic landscapes. Both examples mark
the other possibilities of documenting as world-making, shifting
photography from the depiction of reality to the visualisation of thoughts
and desires within the world of the artist’s work.

DOCUMENTING
AS METHOD
PHOTOGRAPHY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
CURATOR: ZHUANG WUBIN
Chng Seok Tin (b. 1946, Singapore) studied art in Singapore, UK, France
and the USA from 1971 to 1985. Although she majored in printmaking,
her artistic practice encompasses drawing, painting, collage, mixed media,
textile, photography, ceramics, sculpture and installation. In 1988, due to
brain abscess, she lost most of her eyesight. Since then, she has focused
more on mixed media and sculptural work. Her practice addresses nature’s
phenomena and the human condition. She has held 28 solo exhibitions and
participated in more than 100 group shows in Singapore and abroad. In 2005,
Chng was awarded the Cultural Medallion by the government of Singapore.
She is also an accomplished writer and was given the Singapore Chinese
Literary Award in 2007 by the Singapore Literature Society.
Contact Print for Hand Sculpture Series (1978)
Chng Seok Tin (Singapore)

When I first moved to UK in 1975 to study art, I was really

interested in modern art. It was quite different from what we had
in Singapore. The work that I made then was informed by
concepts and creative ideas in what we might call “conceptual
art”. I think this development is natural. The move to UK opened
my mind and I was trying to absorb everything regarding modern
art. It was at times bewildering.

In Hand Sculpture Series, I use the motif of the hand to

symbolise the artist’s hand. The hand is also important to human
lives. I sculpted a hand and positioned it in such a way that it
looked as though it jutted out of a box. I then placed different
objects on the hand and presented the work as mixed media
installation. Photography is used to record the work. Today, the
photographs are the only trace of the work that survived.
(Transcribed and edited by Zhuang Wubin from an interview with Chng Seok Tin on 31
December 2014 in Singapore)
Chua Chye Teck (b. 1974, Singapore) specialises in photography. He has a
Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art) in sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology (RMIT). Chua draws inspiration from everyday objects,
recognising that their simple forms belie the historical and geographical
significance that they encapsulate. His exhibition in 2008, New Castle was
commissioned by the International Photographers and Researchers Network
(IPRN), UK. In 2009 he was awarded a one-year residency at Künstlerhaus
Bethanien, Berlin. In 2014, Chua was invited to participate in the Southeast
Asia Platform of Art Stage, Singapore, where he showed a new direction in
his photography, deconstructing elements in the environment into basic
forms and shapes, and presenting the photographs in black-and-white
format. He will be developing this further for an upcoming exhibition and
book project due in 2016, for which he received Singapore’s National Arts
Council Creation Grant.
 Paradise (2006- )
Chua Chye Teck (Singapore)

Whilst returning to an area I used to spend time in as a teenager, it took me a moment to

recollect my memory of the place, as it had changed drastically.

Located in northeastern Singapore, Punggol used to be a well-developed rural district

where poultry, fish and vegetable farming thrived. It has been taken over by property
business and is now being developed into a typical “satellite town”. The place was cleared
and left empty for a period of time before development started.

This is a common experience people have whenever revisiting a place in Singapore. It is a

country where constant change takes place, where the old is seldom valued unless it
makes monetary sense.

During a visit to Punggol in 2006, I discovered the presence of small makeshift shelters.
Each structure is marked by individuality and temporal existence, and I have been
photographing them since.

These shelters do not belong to the homeless. People who spend time in the area,
including fishing hobbyists, nature lovers and people seeking solitude, create these
shelters. These shelters protect them from the sun, and offer refuge from the crowds and
the concrete jungle.

Over time, I believe these structures will gradually disappear from our cultural and
geographical landscape, which is marked by the pursuit of uniformity and
commercialisation. Paradise pays tribute to these remaining structures of individualism.
(Written by Chua Chye Teck, 2011)
Deden Hendan Durahman (b. 1974, Majalaya) received his BFA at the
Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in 1997. In 2005, he obtained
a Diploma in Fine Art from the Braunschweig University of Art in Germany,
before graduating with a Meisterschüler from the same institution in 2006.
Since then, Durahman has returned to Indonesia to work as an artist,
designer and photographer. As a lecturer at the Faculty of Art and Design,
ITB, he and his colleagues have founded the intermedia studio under the
Visual Art Study Program.

Durahman’s work can be found in the collections of various public

institutions, including the Tama Art Museum in Tokyo and the Print Room
of the Art and History Museum in Geneva. His work has been featured
in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Indonesia, Germany, South Korea,
Belgium, China, Switzerland, Japan, Malaysia, Bulgaria and Singapore,
amongst others.
 CORPUS; Innermemories (2012-13)
Deden Hendan Durahman (Indonesia)

CORPUS features different bodies of work. As a whole,

it is an exploration of forms concerning the intricacies of
human and non-human corpuses. By emphasising
aesthetics, forms are created that exist between the
real and the unreal. I create imageries that encourage
the viewers to make personal associations.

How do we identify someone or something? How do

we construct or re-construct the existence of a
landscape? Our mental process can sometimes result
in imageries that are quite different from factual reality. It
is our imagination that fabricates the corpus as a
universe of its own.
Geric Benedicto Cruz (b. 1985, Manila) is a freelance
photographer / videographer based in Manila. In 2011, he was
one of the winners of the ASEAN-Korea Multimedia Competition in Seoul
for his personal work, Where I End and You Begin. In 2012, Cruz was chosen
to participate in the artist-in-residence program sponsored by the Casa San
Miguel Foundation at San Antonio, Zambales. Second Star to the Right, the
work that he made during the residency, was exhibited in 2013 at the Delhi
Photo Festival, India.
 Second Star to the Right (2012-13)
Geric Cruz (The Philippines)

They are brothers, sleeping under a purple sky pricked with firefly stars.
Sometimes they go hunting, peering into wells for monsters, diving for
mermaids, waiting hours for the last brown spider. Where one boy goes,
another follows.

This is the story before the sun sets, before one boy goes and leaves the
other behind. Their names are maybe Denver, maybe Karlo. Their names
do not matter. They are anyone who ever had a brother, who found out
alone that fireflies die and mermaids never lived.

These are memories, a gift from one brother to another, for every child
who ever found the key to fairyland, and every man who tried to find his
way back.
(Written by Patricia Evangelista)
Based in George Town, Penang, Hoo Fan Chon (b. 1982, Kuala Lumpur)
completed his BA photography at the London College of Communication
and has exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Cologne, London and Seoul. His practice
involves investigating the process of cultural translation. Hoo is interested
in examining the residues of this process in which attempts to translate
or assimilate has been made, resulting at times an unexpected
and incoherent outcome. He is the founder and one of the members
of the artist collective, Run Amok Gallery at George Town.
 Karma Karma Chameleons (2014- )
Hoo Fan Chon (Malaysia)

Karma Karma Chameleons features a series of found photographs of female nightclub

entertainers of the 1980s who sported perm hairstyles, and flamboyant costumes covered
in feathers and sequins. These collected prints are then digitised and restored with the
ladies’ facial features obscured.

Together they provide a glimpse into the glamour portrait practice of that era. They were
often shot from a levelled and head-on angle; the sitter would appear demure or,
occasionally, in more engaging poses. The subjects drew reference from pop idols from
Hong Kong, Taiwan or the West, and then created their own appropriated versions of
archetypal beauty.

This project looks at how photography (studio techniques and physical prints) is used as a
self-promotional tool, or as an extension of self-representation in the form of idol cards and
fan photos. I am interested in the hierarchy of taste structuring the notion of beauty in both
mainstream and sub-cultures; how these antithetical yet symbiotic relationships hinge on
one another to sustain themselves.
(Written by Hoo Fan Chon)
Nguyễn Quốc Thành (b. 1970, Hanoi) is the founding director of QUEER
FOREVER!, the queer art festival in Hanoi in 2013. He is also a founding
member of Nhà Sàn Collective, Vietnam. In 2012, Nguyễn mounted his first
solo show, A Soldiers’ Garden at Japan Foundation, Hanoi.
 A Soldiers’ Garden (2012)
Nguyễn Quốc Thành (Vietnam)

As a photographer, I am interested in portraying men who live with one another

in the same place over a period of time. In my work, I question the boundaries between
homosocial and homosexual desires.

Usually off limits to civilians, I am granted special permission from army authorities to take
photographs of a battalion outside Hanoi on November 2012, where new recruits are
assembled for basic training during the first months of their military service, before they are
relocated to the assigned battalion. They are mostly young men between 18 and 19 years
old, the majority of them coming from provinces rather than the capital Hanoi.
These young men are transported out of home and given a new life, subjected to the
control of army officers. They are in transition in many ways—between home and the army
camp, between the life of a young person and that of a soldier, between a life dependent
on family and one with responsibilities for others.

I am interested in how they negotiate with the military institution. Portraiture is familiar yet
formal, and serves as a frame for the subject’s self-expression. The work results from
a mixture of chance and necessity. Night—a space of desire, intimacy, fear, safety—is the
only time I can make portraits of the soldiers without them being too distracted. As usual,
I ask them “to be themselves”, but also to pose with close friends or friends from their
hometown. Apparently, this runs counter to the orders from officers who watched
from the side, to ensure that the soldiers pose in a serious manner.

This series is created in a space called the soldiers’garden, slightly separate from the
training area but relatively near to an officers’ building where electricity to light the portraits
is available. While some viewers may be drawn to the fresh faces of young soldiers,
the images hint at distances—between the subjects, between the image and the viewer,
between darkness and light.

Later, I am told that in army bases, soldiers often come to the gardens at night to talk
and socialise, and to be heard and seen without fear.
(Written by Nguyễn Quốc Thành)
Noi Satirat Damampai (b. 1982, Hadyai, Thailand) holds a Bachelor degree
in Economics from Thammasat University, Bangkok. Since 2005, she has
worked as a journalist and photographer for various English-language
publications in Southeast Asia. More recently, Damampai has tried to explore
the boundaries between art, documentary photography and creative writing
in her work.

Recent exhibitions: The War Within, Reminders Photography Stronghold,

Tokyo, Japan (2014); The War Within, Asian Women Photographers’
Showcase, Obscura Festival, Penang, Malaysia (2014); Mae Ying,
PhotoPhnomPenh, Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2013); Mae
Ying, The Reminders Project for World Event Young Artists, Wallner Gallery,
Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham, UK (2012).
 The War Within (2012)
Noi Satirat Damampai (Thailand)

Walking up the mountain in a dark tropical jungle, decayed grey skulls

and human corpses were scattered in sight along the narrow trails.

I did not fear in that spell of total darkness. They did not harm me - the
Spirits of the jungle just let me pass through into their mysterious territory.
They were the ghosts who sacrificed their lives over more than 60 years
of fighting. I continued walking, even though I really had no idea of where
the road would possibly lead me.

“Just keep walking,” they were whispering.

And finally, there I was, at the border of the faded dream and stark reality.
It is the War Within - the war within my dream, the war within their land,
and the war within their minds.

#In conversations with and memories of the victims from the world’s
longest civil war: the struggle of the Karen ethnic people for their
homeland, currently located at Karen state, Myanmar.
(Written by Noi Satirat Damampai)
Po Po (b. 1957, Pathein) is one of Myanmar’s leading contemporary artists.
He is considered a pioneer in each of the fields that he has worked in, namely
installation, performance and photography.

Selected exhibitions: If the World Changed, 4th Singapore Biennale, 2013;

Re-Connect: Contemporary Photography from Myanmar, Esplanade Jendela,
Singapore, 2013;
Freedom in Blossom! Gangaw Village and Experimental Art in 1980s Burma,
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, 2012-13; NordArt 2012, Kunstwerk
Carlshütte, Büdelsdorf, Germany; Burmese Arts Festival, Free Word Centre,
London, 2010; Emerging Wave: ASEAN-Korea Contemporary Photo
Exhibition 2010, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, and GoEun Museum of
Photography, Busan, South Korea; plAy: Art from Myanmar Today, Osage
Gallery, Singapore, 2010; Unreal Asia, 55th International Short Film Festival,
Oberhausen, Germany, 2009; Liberation, Saigon Open City, Vietnam, 2007;
Spaces and Shadows: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, House of
World Cultures, Berlin, Germany, 2005; Art Circus, Yokohama Triennale,
Japan, 2005; 3rd Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2000; 1st Fukuoka Asian
Art Triennale, Japan, 1999; Solidconcepts, Judson Church Center, Yangon,
Myanmar, 1997; Untitled, Myanmar Artistic Association Center, Yangon, 1987.
 Searching for Identity Series; Bottle #1 (2002-07)
Po Po (Myanmar)

When people say, “This is a cup” or “This is a bottle”, they identify them not based
on form, but based on the different memories / facts of each object. Perhaps we have
collected many aspects of each object (its “identity”) in our minds.

I try to make photographs that represent objects not only in three-dimension,

but also to collapse the dimension of time into the work.

Working with an everyday object, I move around to take photos of it. I am like the audience
who walk around to view an art object. In other words, I also try to capture
the different times when I stop in front of the object.

These photographs are not images of objects. They are objects of the mind.

Instead of working digitally, I make these photos manually using the multiple exposure
technique, exposing each negative frame four to eight times.
(Written by Po Po)
Pramuan Burusphat (b. 1953, Bangkok) is an artist specialising
in photography and photo-based media. He received his BFA (1976) and MFA
(1979) in visual arts from North Texas State University (presently, University
of North Texas). In 1980, he started teaching at Srinakarinwirot University,
Bangkok. Two years later, he joined Chulalongkorn University (CU) where he
became one of the founding members of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts
in 1982. In 1983, Burusphat started the very first Photography as Art
programme in Thailand at CU. In 1994, he resigned from CU and in 1998, he
settled down permanently in New Zealand.

Since 1977, Burusphat has had eight one-man shows, including one
at the National Gallery, two at the British Council Gallery in Bangkok,
and one at the Los Angeles Photography Centre, California. He has
participated in more than 65 group exhibitions in New Zealand, Thailand,
Southeast Asia, Italy, Germany and the United States.
 Autobiographical Images (1978- )
Pramuan Burusphat
(Thailand / New Zealand)

My interest in photography started in the fall of 1976. I made a series of still-life images,
portraits and self-portraits. These photographs are important because they convinced me
that photography is the right medium for my self-expression. During my photographic
studies, I had gone through many phases of image making—from straight photography
to photo narratives to minimalist / structuralist work.

In 1978, I started making images of an autobiographical nature. According to Webster's

dictionary, autobiography refers to the story of one’s life written by himself or herself.
By implication, autobiographical images refer to visuals that tell the story of one’s life as
composed by oneself.

I will like to quote artist Duane Michals whose photographs and writing have contributed
to my interest in creating autobiographical images:
When you look at my photographs, you are looking at my thoughts.

I am very attached to the person of Stefan Michals. He is the man I never became.
We are complete opposites, although we were born at the same moment.
If we should meet, we would explode. We are like matter and anti-matter.
He is my shadow. I saved myself from him.

I only photograph what I know about, my life. I do not presume to know what
blacks are or what they feel or bored suburban families or transvestites.
And I never believe photographs of them staring into a camera.

I take nothing for granted. I can count on nothing. I am not sure where I once was
certain. I don't know what will be left by the time I'm fifty. That's ok.
(Written by Pramuan Burusphat)
Honoured as National Artist in Literature in 1995, Rong Wong-savun
(1932–2009, b. Chai Nat) began professional life as a photographer.
Despite working professionally only from 1954 to 1964, Rong managed
to stand out from his contemporaries with his unique perspective
of the world, the same gift that later earned him the accolade
of the ‘Eagle of the Literary Garden’ for his inventive use of Thai and English
words in his writings.
 Rama I Bridge (1958)
Rong Wong-savun (Thailand)
His photographic series of the Rama I Bridge, shot in 1958, still looks fresh
and new to us today. His experimental camera angles—very low shots
taken from ground level—tore up the books on compositional rules of that era.
(Written by Manit Sriwanichpoom)
Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah (1907-79, b. Kuala Terengganu)
was an accomplished amateur photographer who was at the forefront of the
development of modern Malayan photography. In 1958, he became the first
Malay to become an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society in the UK.
For over a quarter century, he was the patron and driving force of the
Photographic Society of Malaysia. He was also made an honorary lifetime
member of the Singapore Photographic Society.

Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah was the 14th sultan of Terengganu (1946-79)
and the 4th king of Malaysia (1965-70).
 Kuala Lumpur Kept at Home (1969)
Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah (Malaysia)

When Sultan Ismail Nasiruddin Shah served as the king of Malaysia from 1965 to 1970,
the race riots of 13 May 1969 broke out in Kuala Lumpur (KL). On 15 May, a day after
he signed the curfew to keep everyone at home, the sultan went out under heavy security
with a small entourage and took pictures of the vacated streets in KL from his own
carefully chosen vantage points.

This is the sultan’s most political work, setting it apart from the images of his peers from
the camera clubs. There is a sense of eeriness in these scenes of emptied streets,
with the signs of violence almost non-existent in his photographs. But our impression of
how bustling KL normally is punctures this illusion of tranquillity. Here, we sense
the anguish of the sultan, pleading for a swift return to the social contract of multiculturalism.
(Written by Zhuang Wubin)
Toh Hun Ping (b. 1978, Singapore) is a video artist, writer and former art
lecturer. His video works have been screened at international experimental
film festivals (Paris Festival of Different and Experimental Cinema) and are
presented in art venues both as video installations and live-performance
projections (Sculpture Square and Substation, Singapore). In preparation
for his next video work, Toh is researching into the history of film production
in Singapore. He is now blogging at sgfilmlocations.com and
sgfilmhunter.wordpress.com, websites about film locations in Singapore.
 Deadline (2011)
Toh Hun Ping (Singapore)
I began to take photographs of all my possessions when I was informed that I had to
relocate. The photographs are bleached and combined/sequenced with text
and other related visuals into a one-hour video piece, Deadline.

This is an abridged version, dedicated to a girl whom I have not shared everything with.
(Written by Toh Hun Ping)
Vandy Rattana (b. 1980, Phnom Penh) began photographing with a concern
over the lack of documentation of personal stories, traits and unofficial
monuments of his culture. His early works straddled the line between strict
photojournalism and conceptual practice, and displayed a preoccupation
with the everyday as experienced by the average Cambodian. More recently,
his work critiques historiography by pivoting towards fiction.

Vandy’s recent solo exhibitions include Enter the Stream at the Turn, CAPC,
Bordeaux, France (2014) and Bomb Ponds, Asia Society, NYC, USA (2013).
Recent group exhibitions include The Khmer Rouge and the consequences.
Documentation as artistic memory work, Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin,
Germany (2015), In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video
Installations, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis, USA (2014), and
No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Guggenheim
UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, Asia Society, Hong Kong (2013).
 Walking Through (2008-09)
Vandy Rattana (Cambodia / Taipei)

Walking Through addresses the mismanagement of Cambodia’s rubber resources

with beautiful, almost cinematic shots of one such plantation at Kampong Cham.
At the plantation, overwhelmed by his country’s physical wealth, Vandy felt a sense of calm.
However, the feeling is incongruent with his knowledge that the plantation’s revenue
has been siphoned away from the workers. Vandy cloaks his helplessness in these
deceptively reassuring photographs, perhaps hoping that the beauty of his photographs
can trigger the questions of accountability among the Cambodian audience.
(Written by Zhuang Wubin)
 AT CMU ART CENTER | CHIANG MAI HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
FACULTY OF FINE ARTS, CHIANG MAI UNIVERSITY
THE KLANGWIANG CHIANG MAI MUSEUM PARTNERSHIPS

www.cmphotofest.com ChiangmaiPhotoFestival2015 cmphotofest