Transcript of 2nd Forum

Ruey Loon: This series I did after the Japan series, but I was thinking about the same things. In the end, I have paired them together, but first I will show the photographs individually.

Darren Soh: Just to be a pain in the ass to you—if your photos work in pairs, and from that you form a language, isn’t this gibberish?

Ruey Loon: Yes. These are not the photos that I picked for the final cut. I went back a few steps to when I had about a hundred images, so this should give you a more general idea of what I’ve been shooting and the process.

The way it’s different from photography I do in Singapore is—when you travel you do become very naïve, you see everything pure and simple. Everything is so different and new, and while that, in my mind, shouldn’t be the case—there is a higher level in the way that we perceive things. Even at home, we should examine our environment at a higher level. But somehow overseas…the light is better. In Singapore, the light has this blue tint that I always see when I shoot. Too cold. Overseas, especially higher or lower [latitude], the cast is reddish, so it’s warmer.

When I did this series [in Australia], I did carry out the same idea I had in Japan, but I was with my family, so it was very hard to take my own time to shoot. When I was in Australia, it was like going shopping and then your girlfriend says, “I’ll wait outside, you take your time,” but it’s not the same as going by yourself.

My work is a lot about spaces, but I also take advantage of color. The question is: could these works be been done in Singapore?

Julia: A lot of your subject matter looks like it could be taken anywhere.

Ruey Loon: Yes. Maybe in Singapore I don’t try. It’s not about trying to see something that’s not there—it’s about trying to be aware of your surroundings. If we are rushing off to do a job, then we don’t have time to pause and look…

…In the end, the final pairings came from this body of work.

Soon-Hwa: So when you edit…what do you have in mind? What are you looking for?

Ruey Loon: I had the concept that the photos would be taken at two different points. When the photos are placed together, the viewer will naturally make associations to try to make their relationship make sense. So my concept was to have these associations encapsulate the time in between the two points, the two photos.

© Ung Ruey Loon, Australia

Darren: But this relationship—is it always visual?

Ruey Loon: No, it started out as an emotional one, but then I thought emotional might not make a strong enough connection.

Darren: Because in some of your images from the Japan series, the visual relationship is quite strong.

Ruey Loon: Another one of my basic concerns is, of course, the visual. If you make art that is conceptually strong, but the product is not visually interesting, then why do you present it visually? If it can be presented as an essay, then it is not art. I have this friend that says he can watch many Hollywood movies without looking at the pictures, because the actors’ voices tell you the story. It is more like radio, while the picture is just an accompaniment. But there are certain films that tell the story through moving images. You understand the movie through the editing or the sequence of the pictures. If it’s something that needs so much explanation, if you can’t really fell it when you look at the image…

Darren: Maybe you can show the final pairings for Australia.


© Ung Ruey Loon, Australia

Ruey Loon: OK. The final pairings for the Australia series comment on how man affects the environment—in the form of made-made structures—and then how the environment affects man in return. For example, you see the table behind the caged area—it looks like a cage for humans—but you know it is a man-made environment that is in our control and we can move in and out freely, while the koala bear is not in a cage but we know it is not in its natural environment, either.

Julia: It seems to me that you use formal associations—as in the white dog and the white teapot, or compositional elements…

Ruey Loon: In this series maybe some use those associations, but the compositional decisions are more apparent in the Japan series.

Soon-Hwa: These images make much more sense to me after you edited them, instead of one-by-one.

Darren: To come back to the issue of whether you photographed differently, and if so, why…

Ruey Loon: If I had enough time and enough “bread” to go around Singapore, I believe I should be able to do the same thing. Except the colors would definitely be different—there’s no color in Singapore.

John Cosgrove: There’s a lot of color here!

Darren: Did you see the light yesterday?

John: It’s just that you are comfortable here…

Darren: You take a lot of things for granted because you live here.

Ruey Loon: Yeah, maybe it’s actually the mind-set.

John: When you are overseas you’re not there for six months, you’re there for six days, and you are trying to achieve the most you can. Here you can always give yourself the excuse that you have next week, and then it becomes the week after…

Darren: That can be a double-edged sword. A lot of times when I am overseas, because I am there for such a short time, I try to compile as much as possible. I end up not thinking very much and just shooting.

Have any of you read this? It’s called The Art of Travel. He talks a lot about what people do when they are traveling. I find it very interesting, because he talks a bit about photography here. I’ll just quote a little bit. His name is Alain de Botton, and he is quoting from different people from different periods of history about the various aspects of travel. He encourages people to draw when they travel, because when you try to draw something you actually stop and then stare and then notice details. This is according to John Ruskin, a British writer.

A lot of people use photography to try to capture a memory of a place that is unfamiliar to them, only to digest it later when they are home. He says that “photography alone does not allow you to digest the scene which you are presented with. The true possession of a scene happens when you make a conscious effort to notice elements and understand their construction. We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty will survive in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it. The camera blurs the distinction between looking and noticing, between seeing and possessing; it may give us the option of true knowledge, but it may also unwittingly make the effort of acquiring that knowledge seem superfluous.”

I tend to disagree with this a little. Everybody photographs differently. For myself, I would argue that, other than the fact that the light is different, and the actual subject matter in front of you can only be different—there’s no Sydney Opera House in Singapore—I photograph the same way here that I do overseas. I try to notice certain things that form relationships between my pictures, which don’t come about in pairs, as in Ruey Loon’s case. The pictures should be viewed individually.

These pictures are also from Sydney. They were made about three years ago, when I was first there.

John: You can tell you were overwhelmed by the space.

Darren: The thing about space is Singaporeans have very little of it, in terms of open space. Even here we photograph that way. It is definitely something I crave. You see a lot more of it from when I was in Sydney. [Of a photo:] These people are at a pub at 3 pm. Australians. I have to admit that some of the pictures were taken for the sake of visual interest more than anything else. Again, being on the southern or northern hemisphere, as opposed to being on the equator, the light is different. You’ve seen some of these, John. They were in Photo-i. I have a lot of pictures in the airport because my flight was delayed for seven hours. I had a lot of time to take pictures.


© Darren Soh, Australia

Actually, I probably photographed differently—it’s probably not so overt, I can’t really put it into words—I have some pictures of the Sydney Opera House at the end of this series that were taken this year. They are probably a little bit different.

Q: Are they all digital?

Darren: No. It’s all shot on a Hasselblad. These are from this year. The color is different because I used different paper, but that’s a small difference.

John: There’s a big difference in the pictures you took three years ago and the ones you took just last year. The first time you were there you were overwhelmed by the space, and the second time you went past that and went more in-depth.

Darren: I was very bored there. I was there for three weeks.

John: [Laughs] What were you doing there for three weeks?

Darren: I had two group show openings and they were two weeks apart. So I went to the opera house every other day to see what I could do, the differences in terms of the light and the space…I tried to represent the opera house in as many ways as possible.

There’s something else I would like to show. These pictures might be the antithesis of what we’ve been talking about—how we should photograph the same way wherever we are. There are some countries that don’t allow you to do that. One of these countries is Bangladesh, where everything is in your face. It’s the nature of the country. As someone who is fairer-skinned, I stuck out like a sore thumb. When you stick out like a sore thumb, you become the gazed-upon rather than the person who is doing the gazing. You’ll be able to tell from these pictures what I mean when I say that you are the one being looked at rather than the one doing the looking.

John: Were these in Chobi Mela?

Darren: These were from the last Chobi Mela. It is almost impossible to photograph people in a candid manner when you are in Bangladesh, because everywhere you go you are looked at. Richard [Koh] is exhibiting there now.

Soon-Hwa: Were you there on vacation?

Darren: I don’t think anyone goes there on vacation…

Soon-Hwa: No? I’d like to...

Darren: No, I was doing some teaching there, and some research.

Soon-Hwa: How long were you there for?

Darren: Two weeks and three weeks, one year after another. All-in-all five weeks. After a while I gave up on shooting candid and just did portraits, because everyone there wants to be photographed. I think in some places, you end up photographing according to the place rather than your own sensibilities. I suppose I could consciously photograph in the way I normally do, but I would be missing out on all these other things that are there.


© Darren Soh, Bangladesh

John: I think the way you photograph normally is informed by the place you’re in. When you were in Australia, you were taken by the space there. When you went to Dhaka, you were taken away with the humanity, with the people…you photographed in a way that was appropriate to the situation. You photographed the way you wanted to photograph. You could have gone [to Bangladesh] and shot a bunch of pictures like the ones of Australia, but it wouldn’t have felt right.

Darren: No, it wouldn’t have.

Soon-Hwa: In Bangladesh you seem much more involved with the place and the people there.

Darren: It’s not so much that I’m involved with the people; what you see is the people being involved with me. Personally, I wouldn’t put one set of images above the other, but I do think they are very different. This set of images are about human beings more than anything else, the other is about space.

Soon-Hwa: But the people in Australia, they are not very interested in you…

Darren: It’s maybe more about me than anything else, and how I react to being in a different country with a different culture. In a sense, we may photograph differently in different places. I don’t think I could achieve images like the ones from Bangladesh in Singapore, because Singaporeans are by nature very suspicious of cameras. It would be interesting to try. I try not to pigeonhole any place with a set of preconceived notions or ideas about a specific way I should photograph. That comes across as a bit too forced, for me. Sometimes I do specifically try to conceptually photograph a different way in the same place, but then it sometimes feels too forced. However, having said that, it is a good experiment to try to photograph differently in the same place. When you’re home, that’s a good opportunity to experiment this way, because you have more time. I have tried to photograph Singapore in strange, different ways. Some of it has worked, some of it hasn’t.

Julia: The photos you took in Dhaka seem more celebratory of the people, of the culture. It seems like you were really enchanted with this place. Do you think when you travel you think less critically?

Darren: It really depends. If you are photographing on an assignment, it becomes a completely different ballgame, because you have an objective. In both of these sets of images, there was no specific objective, no direction as to what I needed to bring up. In a way, I just let whatever I saw form itself in front of the camera.

The last trip I took, which was to Thailand, was purely for assignment. I found out that after finishing my work I couldn’t photograph for myself anymore. When I was finished with the assignment, I just went back to my hotel to sleep, because I was so tired. I’ve have not edited the images yet, but I suspect they will not be as forthcoming as the images I take for myself. There is the stress of having to deliver the images. I went to Chiang Mai to photograph a portrait of someone, as well as his house. So it was basically photographing an interior. So I just went there and shot an interior just as I would shoot any other interior. But then I didn’t do anything else because I was so tired. I flew in, did that, flew out.

Ruey Loon: But these are like your first contact/impression [of Bangladesh], do you think that going again, things would change…

Darren: It might be. I need to go to Bangladesh again to find that out. However, I realize that—I’m not sure if it’s the same for all of you—if you are away from a place for a long amount of time, you will tend to see it differently after you return, because your memory of the place fades. No matter how hard you try, your photographs cannot—and should not—capture everything that you experience. Let’s say you go to Australia once, then when you go a second time, you will find there were many things you did not see the last time you went. There are many things that will still surprise you, and so that convergence may not come. The interesting thing about traveling is that whenever I’m away from Singapore for a long enough time, let’s say about three weeks, when I come back to Singapore I tend to photograph better at home. Things are a little bit unfamiliar.

This leads to this other passage from The Art of Travel that I want to read. In his last chapter, he talks about mind-set: “If only we could apply a traveling mind-set to our own locales, we might find these places become no less interesting than, say,” other countries you’ve visited…he continues to define the traveling mind-set. “Receptivity,” he says, might be one of the chief characteristics: “if we are receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or what is not interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable, small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on the wall. We find that the supermarket or hairdresser’s shop unusually fascinating.” He goes on about all these little things that you take for granted when you’re home, that you notice overseas because they are different. But he says that if you apply that, in Ruey Loon’s words, naivety and pureness and simplicity to where you’re from, your home, you’ll be able to see things you never noticed before. And maybe that will make you photograph better. Chi Yin?


© Sim Chi Yin, Siberia

Sim Chi Yin: Ok, I’ll leave the art theory to the guys, because I am not an artist, I am a journalist. I am more of a documentarian at heart. I would like to show some pictures from my recent trip to Tibet on the new railroad from Beijing to Tibet. This was done for an article that was in the Straits Times in September. So a few caveats: this was a news assignment, back-to-back it was twelve days and I was on the road every day. You are plunked in a new place, shoot everything you can, get as many images as you can, get as many notes as you can, and come back and write an article.

The train ride proper took 48 hours. Left Beijing on a Thursday night at 9:30, and spent two nights on the train, arrived in Lhasa on a Saturday. You can tell that while you are on the train, the photographic options are pretty limited: either you shoot in the train, or out of the window. You can’t open the window, because it’s a pressurized train. After a while, I got pretty frustrated—I was about to break a window. Apologies to fans of Ansel Adams; the landscapes that I shot were through dust-speckled windows and out of a moving train, so the images aren’t 100% sharp, either—some of them.

There are about 120 pictures. It’s a loose edit, because I wasn’t quite sure about what kind of audience I was going to get; there has been a lot of interest in the railroad and the politics of it. After the story ran in the Straits Times, I got e-mails asking for travel tips to get to Tibet. I left it as the journey itself, chronological. The first part is the train ride proper, then I arrived in Lhasa, and then I ended up driving back. I got into a four-wheel drive and drove over 4-5 days to get pictures of the towns on-route. I ended up in Qinghai, the province right next to Tibet proper. You can tell at the end of the set, that it has a very Chinese feel. I thought I’d end off with a few personal works, a few snaps from a long time ago. Non-work work.

Darren: Do you ever get off for an extended period of time?

Chi Yin: No. There are only six stops all the way, for 4,000 kilometers. You get a ten-minute stop, then a six-minute stop, then a five-minute stop…It’s called an express train. It gets you to Lhasa in the shortest possible (train) time. Of course you could fly there in four hours. It is the train that takes you across the Tibetan plateau, which was pretty impassable before. You could go by car, but it’s 4,000 kilometers!

Darren: How much is the return fare?

Chi Yin: Second class is 800 yuan. This is Golmud, which is in Qinghai. This is where they actually put on three extra locomotives in order to get up to 5,000 meters above sea leavel. Everything is pressurized and oxygenized, because of the altitude.

John: Is the altitude sickness worse on the train or off?

Chi Yin: Both. Some got sicker when they got off. But there were people throwing up all over the ground, even on the train. The third class was full of workers, mainland Chinese, who were going into Lhasa to seek their fortune, I guess. Second and first class were middle class Chinese tourists mostly, in their Gore-Tex boots and thermos flasks. The tickets were completely sold out, so many got their tickets on the black market.

Q: Did you drive all the way back?

Chi Yin: No. I stopped in Golmud then took a normal, ordinary train, and then I flew back. It’s too long, and of course boss is like, “Come back now.” Shortest time possible. Shortest, cheapest way. And then there’s the high altitude, and you don’t fool around with that.

Q: How do you deal with the high altitude?

Chi Yin: Diamox. Oxygen tubes. There are sockets in the wall, and you just plug in and then there’s a gushing sound of oxygen coming out. Quite a few people needed that. I popped a pill that gave me numb fingers, and numb fingers aren’t very good for shooting, so I stopped taking it after a while.

Q: [Of a picture of a tourist with his shirt off:] Was it very warm on the train?

Chi Yin: It wasn’t really that hot. I think he had one too many beers.

Darren: It’s an engineering feat. I’ve been reading about how they have to…

Chi Yin: Yes, they had to use coolants…they used many, many different ways to keep it [the permafrost] from melting. Scientists have estimated that in ten years’ time, it’s going to be a problem.

This is a man we met, but because we couldn’t talk through the window, a girl wrote to him on paper and he signed back. He’s a railroad worker.

Julia: How often does the train run?

Chi Yin: Everyday, from six different cities in China proper. It’s bringing something like 4,000 tourists into Lhasa everyday.

Julia: And it’s fully booked everyday…

Chi Yin: At the moment, yes. I think. This is Lhasa. It’s overrun by Chinese tourists…

…It’s become quite an excursion for [local] families—many of them have never seen a train before. They go up to the train platform and sit there with a beer. They don’t have a concept of train timetables, so when I went in the morning, there were families there already when the next train didn’t come until 5pm. It’s become a bit of a novelty for them.

Darren: Did you see the mainland Chinese influence in Lhasa…

Chi Yin: Yes, yes. Academics and free-Tibet lobbyists lamenting that. This railway is meant to accelerate that a lot. In and around the train station in Lhasa there has been a construction boom. Investment coming in.


© Sim Chi Yin, Tibet

This is prostration. There are Tibetans who make the pilgrimage to Lhasa and prostrate themselves every step of the way from their village. It takes them as long as three years.

Darren: What is the opinion of Tibetans, do half of them think the railroad is good for the community and half…

Chi Yin: I don’t think it’s half. There are Tibetans in government who naturally think it’s a good thing, and I think that business people think it will bring in money, so they welcome it. But there’s a real angst about any kind of symbolic or real Chinese influence, and the train/railway is such a symbol of Chinese influence. I couldn’t put a number on it, but if you talk to regular Tibetans…

Q: Did Tibetans act a certain way toward you because you look Chinese?

Chi Yin: They thought I was Chinese the whole time. They can’t tell. They thought I was southern Chinese.

Q: Did they become more open to you when they found out you were Singaporean?

Chi Yin: Maybe a little. It helped when I spoke English through a guide, rather than Mandarin.

Darren: Where did you find the guide? Were they Tibetan or Chinese?

Chi Yin: I arranged it before I went. I had a Tibetan guide. You won’t get anywhere with a Chinese guide. Absolutely nowhere. I had one on the first day, she was a liar. She told me lots of interesting “facts” that weren’t true. This is one of the bigger train stations in Tibet proper. It’s in a place called Nagchu. What you saw just now, a big slab of concrete plunked in the middle of the plains…

Darren: The middle of nowhere…

Chi Yin: That’s pretty much what the landscape looks like now, dotted with bits of concrete.

[Of a photograph:] This is a farmer who lives close to the tracks. He’s had ten sheep, I think, knocked down by the train. It used to be that—on the highways—if cars ran them down, he could get compensation from the drivers. “When they are knocked down by the train, who do I ask?” It’s a real problem for him.

Darren: Are there any positive effects that you can say are coming from this railway?

Chi Yin: If you count tourism, investment, as positive, then yes, there’s going to be a lot of that. But how much will it trickle down to the regular Tibetan people? How else could you quantify a positive effect? [About a photo:] That’s a horseracing festival. Yes, there’s already a Giordano store in Nagchu.

This is in China proper, in Golmud. It used to be that people had to come here to get trucks to go into Lhasa. There are posters everywhere celebrating the opening of the railway. It’s a real source of pride for the Chinese. Just one province away, one night’s train ride away from Lhasa, that’s what it’s like.

Q: Do you think Lhasa is changing because of the train?

Chi Yin: Of course. It’s going to be completely different. It’s already hard to find “real” Tibetan corners in Lhasa today.

Q: Do you know how the Chinese feel about the Tibetans?

Chi Yin: Oh yes, it’s well documented. [The Chinese] all think they are buffoons, and backwards. They don’t think very much of them. To them it’s just a place to go now because there’s money to be made. To them it’s cute. They’ve got the culture thing going. They have some interesting costumes, so…incidentally there’s a Tibetan restaurant that has just opened in Singapore. Opened by Chinese.


© Sim Chi Yin, Tibet

Q: Other than the government, you don’t think that other people welcome the idea of development?

Chi Yin: Yes, I think there are some people who welcome development. But I think it’s one of those long-standing debates of whether you preserve traditional culture and not develop, or you welcome development and try to marry tradition and development. I don’t have the answers, but there is a genuine angst amongst regular Tibetans. They feel they are losing something if they open their doors to Chinese influence. There have been numerous reports, international law reviews, about the situation in Tibet. In this case, it’s not just development vs. tradition. In this case it’s laced with this whole notion of “Chinese-ness”…imperialism. It has province status at the moment.

Darren: But historically, Tibet…

Chi Yin: Like I said, the jury’s still out. Yes, in 1959, the Chinese did march in. Some people say that in 1913 Tibet actually declared independence, or what amounted to independence. But there’s a long history going back to the Qing and the Ming, and it’s never been clear what Tibet’s status is…

…Really it’s hard to say if Tibet will really benefit economically. If you talk to any Chinese businessman there, he will say, “Oh, I’m not here for long, high altitude is not good for my health, and my skin will get ugly...”

John: Well it’ll depend on the rich American and European tourists…

Chi Yin: A luxury train’s going to start up in 2008. It’s going to be about 1,000 dollars a night. You’ll have a butler, a queen-size bed…It’s going to be like the Orient Express, that sort of thing.

Q: What has the Dalai Lama said about the railway?

Chi Yin: Five years ago he said it would be a disaster, just bad, bad, bad. More recently he’s said, if it’s not laced with a political objective, and it will bring benefits to the Tibetans and Tibet proper, then he welcomes it. He is still exiled, and many Tibetans wish he could come back, but we don’t know if that will happen…

…Ok I’ll just show a few snaps of my other projects. These are from Siberia, Romania, and Cuba from some years back. That’s in Romania. These are the Roma gypsies, who live in a ghetto. I did these pictures for a charity.


© Sim Chi Yin, Romania

Darren: Do you find that you photograph differently with digital?

Chi Yin: I don’t like it. There’s no relationship with the camera…yet.

Darren: There’s a lot of relationship with the camera…when you are staring at the little screen all the time…Do you think you could have done this Tibetan railway [project] on your Leica?

Chi Yin: If my company wanted to pay for all the film and processing, and if I had more time, yes.

Darren: But if the time was the same?

Chi Yin: Then no. While I was traveling I had to put together the story at the same time. I was doing text and pictures. I am a very recent convert to digital, like a few months ago, and I’m not a complete convert yet. Generally, I don’t really like this electronic stuff. If I’m shooting film and my battery’s dead, no light meter—so what? It still works. With digital, I’ll worry about if my battery’s dead. Just a practical consideration. There’s no real difference, just different sets of practical considerations. I did all these photos on one battery. I just kept charging—I didn’t have to use my spare. So, not a huge problem. But I haven’t quite developed the same relationship with the camera yet.

Q: So do you shoot differently in a different place…

Chi Yin: I tend to agree with Darren, that you don’t shoot differently in a different place. How we see is how we see. The only thing about being in a foreign place is that your senses are much far alive, because it’s strange to you. Like John said, there are lots of things that you take for granted here. But when I was a teenager I used to walk around on Sunday mornings on Beach Road and Little India and all that—beautiful light—and you can shoot like you’re a stranger in your own country. You make pictures.