We're Hiring!

Since opening in July 2006, our gallery has established itself as a choice space for photographers in Singapore and in the region. Our Saturday forums are also well-attended and referenced.

We are now looking for a full-time gallery manager/assistant and a few part-timers, as we prepare to move into the next exciting stage.

The ideal candidate is one who is a self-starter and not afraid to try new things. Being a very small outfit, we value teamwork and a sense of mission. Since our gallery is still very new, we want people who really believe in making a difference.

We expect you to have an excellent command of written and spoken English, and ability to do so in Chinese will be an added advantage.

Needless to say, a keen interest in photography, art history and arts in general is a prerequisite. Excellent organizational skill is also a big plus.

As a member of our team, you will be involved in all aspects of our gallery operations, including but not restricted to writing, curating, programming, organizing and maintaining our websites.

Interested? Please send your application, including CV, salary expectation & references, to co-founder Tay Kay Chin at kaychin@kayngeetanarchitects.com.

Transcript for FreeFlow #7 Forum by Paul Kohl & Shannon Castleman (watch this space for further updates of the Q&A session)

Paul Kohl: Hi everyone,

My name is Paul Kohl, I’m American. I was educated in the San Francisco Institute in California. For my undergraduate work I went to graduate school at the Purdue University. Lafayette, Indiana, a big school for engineering, agriculture and has a very small art department. Which I thought it is good because I was at that point, matured where I won’t like a lot of external supervision.

I was in New York city, I was in the army for a while, I was a nurse… Kind of a nurse, in Vietnam in the prisoner-of-war camp. After the army, I started photographing. When my works came to be what I thought as my own.

Right, so this is my first body of works that I recognized to be fairly unique to me. It’s hard to see here, but the surface of the print is very grainy. They are intentionally over exposed, over developed. I did whatever is necessary to make the surface of the prints as important as possible.

A phrase constantly buzzes in my mind,

“the map is not the territory… the map is not the territory… the map is not the territory…”. And what it means to me is that photography has been used as a map, when u take a picture, you intend to refer to something. But I was determined to take something, where the images lose their referents. I wanted the audience to look into the prints and not think about where it came from, what it means, what-has-been. But to think of them as only an experience, contained and fixed onto the surface of the print. Nothing else.

So in order to achieve that, I gave as many things as I could. I chose papers with textures and make the images as grainy as I could, to stop the break-down, that recognition of the referents. These works continued, until, I got a national endowment arts grant to work as an artist for a year. I took that money and went to Japan. I’ve been interested in Japanese culture, I was practicing the martial art aikido in San Francisco, I’ve been wanted to get out of the United States.

So I went to Japan and started making pictures. Photographs like this.

These images are pretty much the same kind of image I was making in United States. The difference was that, when I was in Japan, I didn’t have the same kind of chemicals as I would have in the United States. So, I have to change the way I was making pictures once I was in Japan for a period of time. And I started working with square films, 6 x 6 negatives. The process became much simpler.

As you can see here, my images before was much of a landscape, where now, I was taking an interest in symbolism. The pictures I’m making, I don’t want them to stuck on the surface, I want them to go inside and work on the sub-conscience reaction. So, I think they are not about photography, more about emotions. I’m not sure where these objects I’ve photographed go, but they are not the surface images like what I was doing before.

I lived in Japan for about four years, working as a linguist teacher. So I was taking pictures and having a good time. It was in the middle-late 70s, when Tokyo hasn’t had that bubble experience. Before the bubble, Tokyo still had that experience coming out of the Second World War. They are still recovering, and Japan hasn’t seen itself becoming top of the world. It was quite a wonderful place to be.

I eventually went back to the United States, went to graduate school and began working in color. I’m not going to show whole lot of these, as the next exhibition I’m having here, they’re going to be color prints coming out of this series. But just to give you a taste of it, it’s from the vernacular landscapes through exploration on foot in the cities and country-sides of United States.

My shadow, starts to crept in a lot of these pictures, which I couldn’t keep myself out of (hehe).

My wife is Japanese, we had two children. We lived in the United States together until about 1995, I taught at art school from United States, the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. But in 1995, the economic situation became tough and we had to return to Japan thereafter.

Then, I was working on this body of work, it’s called “Two Fish, Out of Water”. There’s a couple of images here, and this little thing right here, is called a “fugu”, the blowfish. The Japanese love it, they’ll tease themselves with death and eat it even if it’s poisonous. It killed a couple of people every year, from eating contaminated blowfish.

Two Fish, Out of Water
http://www2.gol.com/users/pkohl/two%20fish-slideshow/slideshow.html#1

Anyway, this is the fugu, and this is me. And these are the two fish. Both of them are out of the water. And it’s my reaction once again alien, being in a culture not my own. Being sort of outside, photographing from my point of view. Again, my shadow’s in a lot of these pictures. They’re taken mostly in Otaka, Kobe, Yokohama, some western parts of Japan.

Very often when I start a new body of works, I’ll end up changing the camera that I use. That helps me to get a fresh viewpoint. From 35mm to 6 x 6, to 6 x 7 and back to 35mm negatives, all I can do to mix it up, to question my way of seeing. To change developers, whatever I can do to retain the process fresh.

Also, I’ve sort of moved from darkroom printing, to digital imaging. I still do shoot with films and scanned them with a film scanner and print them with large Epson printers. I love films, and to me, they are still sort of a safety net.

So I moved from “Two Fish, Out Of Water” to the series you see on the walls. Once again I changed films, to 645 negatives, but its printed on using digital process. What u see in this series is that, I put it on very special paper. Each sheet is handmade, in Japan, by the Origami paper company. And I went to stay with them for sort of a week, in helping to put on a coating for the papers.

It’s really really beautiful. So I came to realize, that whenever people look at these photographs they say “Wow! The paper’s great!” (laughs) So it’s like getting a new suit and walking out of your house and everybody says wow! Your suit’s wonderful! (it’s not you), it’s not the pictures it’s the paper so, you’ve got to walk the fine line around here and not let the paper take over the imaging. But, for me, I’m happy. It works.

The print was wonderful, had a great time working on it. The next show, the color show, will be printing on a different kind of paper. So you’ll be seeing the images, not just the paper (laughs).

So, we were in Japan for about ten years and my kids graduated from high school and then went back to University in United States. They’re out of the house, so my wife and I decided to just leave Japan. We came to Singapore where I’m teaching in NTU. Hopefully, I’ll be here for a few years, even though I have to live with Singapore heat.(laughs)

Kay Ngee: Why B&W for Japan? Especially when coming from such a colorful city…

Paul Kohl: You think so?

Kay Ngee: Of course….

Paul Kohl: When I was in the country, I walked around all the time and I thought nothing around was colorful. I saw only Black and White, I saw Japan as only beautifully graphic places. There is always the sense of being arranged compositionally, even though just casual architectures. But still I see no colors, even the people there... They don’t dress so colorfully, they wear very subdued shades of greys, browns... The most colorful thing was the pachinko corners, the big orange, reds and yellows.

Of course, I really love Black and White. Another issue is that, for me I want to do as much as I can to be in control. I can develop my own films, I can control the exposure during printing, and also control how the images go.

Kay Ngee: I have a second question to ask, but we’ll continue later. Let’s hear from Shannon first.

Shannon Castleman: Alright, now, just a question hm… how many people here saw my photo exhibition in this gallery before?

Hanoi về đêm

(laughs) Yup… I didn’t have much to say about the history of me, so, here I’ve got two bodies of works with me that I think they’re kind of relevant to Paul’s. The rest of my works, I shoot more of people.

But I guess, I’ll give you a little of my history. I went to my undergraduate at the Tisch School of Arts in New York. And their program is fine arts and commercial and kind of a mix, and after graduating, my works were very, kind of staged documentary. It was at that time when it was very popular with Nan Goldin and Philip-Lorca diCorcia.

I never really plan to be a commercial photographer, but the works I was doing in a fine arts context was very commercially viable. So I suddenly thought about working as a commercial photographer, I kind of worked in the fashion. I thought that was really great, because I was doing the work I loved and I could do my personal work if I do paid work.

For about eight years down the road, I had a crisis. It felt wrong…so very wrong. So I had a trip down to Cuba, with a group of students from San Francisco I taught. I really want to practice and go back to grad school. So, this is a project I did in grad school, called Relevant Case Notes.

Relevant Case Notes

When I first moved to San Francisco, I don’t know how many years back then, but there were very huge human death cases. San Francisco is a place where everything’s politically correct, everyone does everything right and also everyone pretends all these people aren’t there. And once I have this experience of where a human being just died in my arms and nobody seem to care. I was terribly affected by it.

And the ENP was saying that 200 people died a year on the streets in San Francisco, they were very cold about the whole thing. So I started researching on this whole issue and this is the same time I was really struggling with school project, like what I can work on, I’ve always photographed people. I don’t really know what kind of projects I wanted to do, so I started research on this interesting thing that I was concerned why everybody was ignoring.

So I came across something call the human death report, it states cases of where all these people have died in the last couple of years. And I had the information of one two lines about the last moments of their lives, how they died, how they were found, and so, that was the Relevant Case Notes.

Using these Relevant Case Notes, I’ll go to the locations and sort of became the interpreter of their last moments that occurred there, at the exact time of their deaths. Which was always known when they were found, so this is one body of works…

Here, I began to use lightings, kind of using the lights to structure what happened there. These were shot with 4 x 5 with very long exposures opening the aperture to nearly an hour, very long.

In the beginning, when I was doing more of an installation, I would put the case numbers down and show them in a filing cabinet. The angles were much more dramatic. People could go to the filing cabinet to find the case.

I hope people could begin to see all these places in San Francisco were the last moments of someone’s life. For me, San Francisco is mapped with all these stories, all these people who wouldn’t be here anymore. How we don’t really think about these spaces when we walk over it, all that could have happened there. So, it’s the history of place as well.

This is one of the ones, the later ones that I did with lightings.

Sometimes, when I go to these places I can really imagine where this person has been.

This one says Wilken Berkeley, the MRT there.

It’s not like shooting here or even Hanoi at night, there is danger in San Francisco at night. So it was a very difficult project, because most of these places are inhabited by violent populations. To be there working in the alley, is very dangerous.

Paul Kohl: Are these the years?

Shannon: The year and the case number.

This one was violent, it was a knife stabbing. For many of them, they were alone.

This one in particular, you can really feel someone has taken the place. It happened in 1998 and I took it in year 2005. How many people have laid in the exact spot since then?

Nothing changed.

A lot of buildings have changed, places have changed, it’s kind of tough to find the exact spot then. So I have to sort of interpret, almost use my guts to sort of feel it.

Ok… not a very up-beat project (laughs), but it paints the way I look at things.

Peripatetic Entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia 2007

It affected my last project I did in Hanoi because I became very aware of the history of the States and what has gone on before there. So, I’m just going to show you a little bit of this, to contextualize why I was in Hanoi. This is a long term project, where I have a grant through the ADM, School of Art, Design and Media, where I’m also a lecturer, to work about mobile businesses and sort of the space of mobile businesses.

Particularly, mostly focusing on Hanoi and Mumbai, but looking at how as these places are becoming obviously mobile and more consumer culture that more of Hanoi are getting phased-out. So, this project will involve media film here in Singapore and some sculpture elements, but, we’ve been in Hanoi documenting these businesses.

And, these people are photographed whenever in we’ve been in Hanoi all the time. We constantly photographed, the beauty of photographing with a 4x5 camera, my camera, is that people they love it, because they’re so comfortable in front of it, because you’re not behind it when you’re photographing. And I’m shooting in Polaroid, and they actually get the prints. And it kind of draw the crowd and it ends up being something that we do together because they see and want what they like to see.

This project has a lot of different aspect, but the first part of it was photographing people and also to use that to get something for the grads. So this project was on my mind when I was shooting the works that was in this gallery. So, early in the evening we will work on this.

I love this film, I’m going to start making it. It really changes street photography. People who were photographed, received this little print. And I have the negative, so I just take away.

So, this is the last project, I really was looking at the changes in Hanoi. So I did this really to have a show for this gallery, so this was… their fault (laughs).

Hanoi về đêm

I was also thinking much about this space, but it really was different if I knew what kind of a life it was going to have at night afterwards. But I was thinking about kind of my last project in San Francisco in the history of a space. At the same time, looking at the streets and the landscapes, how the space, the streets and the people I’ve photographed in the early parts of the day were chained. So I was really looking at the whole business of consumerism in the backdrop of the old world landscape in Hanoi.

So all these were shot between midnight and 4am… My husband and I would drive on the motorbike around for hours and hours until I found them. Sometimes I would see them the night before and think about it the next day. I was really more of a hunter, finding the exact spaces that I wanted. Articulate what out of some of these places I see in Hanoi.

So things, buildings that have always been down there where everyone has their own little restaurant, but now we’re seeing Coca Cola, being used as covering for the restaurant. So there’s this juxtaposition between this new consumerism and corporate culture with small entrepreneur where it’s still happening there.

Audience: Did you create the lightings?

Shannon: Ah… this one is natural. The only one down here at the bottom, I still use the motorbike lights. Because there were motorbikes that were going by, and I really liked that light. And the other beauty of the 4x5 is that you can close and open the shutter, so I still have to avoid a lot of traffic by shut and open, opening and shut.

This one also has an added light at the bottom. But there was a construction site going round here, so this area’s lighted up by the construction area.

Hanoi is really a unique city and I’ve always liked photographing at night. There’s no one around at night, Hanoi is so busy and vibrant during the day. At night, there’s nothing. It’s like the streets closed down, there’s not a single person, everywhere in Hanoi. It’s a very safe place, but they think is dangerous. So they put everything away, to make sure nothing is stolen. But comparatively with shooting in San Francisco it is safe here (in Hanoi), other than I can’t communicate if somebody tries to do anything (laughs).

As you can see these numbers everywhere on the walls… is anybody curious about what these numbers are?

KC: Advertising for properties?

Shannon: Yup. They’re advertising for home improvements.

So as Kay Ngee’s pointed out… I don’t know if you were here for my exhibition opening, that I am an American. So I would definitely notice my culture kind of coming in. And to go back to where my crisis started in photography… my crisis in photography started in Cuba. Also, my American culture in New York.

(to be continued, watch this space for further updates of the Q&A session with Paul Kohl and Shannon Castleman)

Opening reception: Simplicity, 18th Apr 2008

Ongoing Exhibition: Simple/Simplicity by Paul Kohl, Part I

Photographic Exhibition:

15 April – 7 May 2008

Opening Reception:

Friday 18 April 2008, 7:30pm

Kay Ngee Tan Architects- Gallery

16-17 Duxton Hill, Singapore 089600

Gallery Hours: Tues – Fri 11am-7pm, Saturday 11-6pm, by appointment.

Kay Ngee Tan Architects Gallery is pleased to present Simple/Simplicity - a twin solo-exhibition of Colour/Black&White photographic works by Paul Kohl.

Simplicity showcases a series of black and white photographic prints made by Paul Kohl during his Artist-in-Residence program with the Awagami Paper Factory, Japan in 2006- becoming one of a few pioneering photographers to produce images on handmade Japanese papers (washi).

Contrasting himself as a photographer in America, a nation where individualism and freedom is celebrated, against Japan- a country with a society full of codes in behaviors, Paul Kohl’s works reflect his attempts to make sense of an unfamiliar country, a strange culture. Journeying through the streets of Japan, he engages himself to objects and spaces, devoting this process solely with his camera.

Paul draws influences from jazz music especially that of John Coltraine, Miles Davis, and Charles Mingus into his works. His interests in Zen, the martial arts and Meditation propel the heavy Buddhist symbolism in his images. Paul’s prints remind us of the course-grained prints favored by William Klein and Daido Moriyama.

A rubber tire triumphal half-emergence from the ground, a withering decayed poster of a man against a polished concrete metal surface and a sleeping faded Buddha flattened, contrasting itself up against the man-made metal structure. Paul symbolically closes up on his subjects, leaving his images fully non-existent of suggestions to time and space. He denies imagination, always embracing the heightened reality the camera is able to capture.

Through these images, he conveys his desires to record the simplicity through Black and White Photography, in his opinions, essentially strips his subjects naked with its monochromes where color photography solely fixes itself to surface of things.

Paul Kohl graduated from The San Francisco Institute in Photography with a Bachelor’s Degree in 1973. He further pursued his Master Degree in Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana in 1985. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Japan and the States from 1974 - 2009, with Simple/Simplicity being his first solo-exhibition in Singapore.

His works were collected internationally by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Fogg Museum at Harvard University and the Awagami Paper Museum, among others. No stranger to grants and awards, he received the National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Photography Fellowship in 1976 and became the only writer in English awarded with the Takeshi Kaikoi Award 1997. He is currently a guest lecturer in NTU.

For further information, please contact Ee Peng at gallery@kayngeetanarchitects.com or (65)64230198.

Freeflow #7 Forum: Shannon Castleman & Paul Kohl

Hi All,

Come and join us on the forum by Shannon Castleman and Paul Kohl in a discourse as they share the search for their self-identities as American photographers in foreign lands.

Date: 19th Apr 2005, Sat
Time: 2 -5pm

Pls register with us through gallery@kayngeetanarchitects.com or call 6423 0198. Limited to first 30 participants!

Hanoi về đêm Opening Reception: 28 Mar 08, 7:30pm

Hanoi về đêm by Shannon Castleman

19 March – 12 April 2008

We are pleased to present Hanoi về đêm - the first solo exhibition in Singapore by fine art photographer, Shannon Castleman.

Shannon's work explores the relationship of people, both individuals and wider communities, to the urban environments in which they live. Her approach to the photographic process focuses upon the use of traditional documentary techniques, offset by subtle, but insistent, direction of light and space. Her work is marked by the photographer's conscious engagement with the very experience she seeks to represent, from a world apparently observed, to a world which is at once created and recorded.

Hanoi về đêm is a product of Castleman's desire to bear witness to the profound transformation the city continues to undergo following the turbulence of Vietnam's twentieth-century history. The capital's spaces and its traditional social structures coexist, sometimes uneasily, with the signs of greater economic prosperity and an increasing consumer culture.

Part of a wider exploration of the fate of mobile businesses in Southeast Asia, these photographs explore the flip-side of Hanoi as a site of frenetic commercial activity and throw into relief the vestiges of its Colonial structures. The images reveal the process of the city's nightly hibernation as the people, vehicles, and goods which populate every inch of its streets during the business day begin recede in the late evening. Pavements are washed, left abandoned and unfamiliar; the city itself appears as a deserted stage on which urban debris testify to the day's earlier performances.

Shannon graduated with a BFA in Photography from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in 1993. She spent eight years working as a freelance photographer, before returning to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, receiving her MFA in 2004. Her experience across a broad array of professional assignments, ranging from photojournalism to fashion, later informed her personal work in its fusion of documentary style and fictional staging.

Her images have been included in a number of exhibitions, both in her native United States and internationally. In 2003 she enjoyed a residency at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, under the direction of Tony Labat. Soon after, Castleman undertook a position as an Assistant Professor of Photography, at Dar Al-Hekma College, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She continues to be involved in arts education here in Singapore, at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography.

Gallery co-founders share their views with Lianhe Zaobao newspaper

Gallery co-founders Tan Kay Ngee & Tay Kay Chin tell Lianhe Zaobao newspaper, Singapore's largest Chinese daily, why they started the gallery and what they hope to achieve.

Q&A Session with Chow Chee Yong, 30th Feb

Hi everyone, the transcript for Q&A Session of 30th Feb with Chow Chee Yong is up!

Kay Ngee:

Hello everyone, I’m Kay Ngee, thank you for coming today. Photography is something we encounter much in Singapore, but seldom surrealistic ones like these. Surrealism, or Dadaism, when it comes to mind, we frequently associate with Andre Breton, Lius Brunuel, Dali or Magritte.

Like Dreams, we often see our true self, or the sub-conscience in a lot of these images.

So when I first saw Chee Yong’s prints, I was shocked at the images, which have a real spooky, alienating feeling, there is something quite dark about them. So how would someone that seems so cheerful, a father with four kids, to do something like that?

We are most delighted to hear from Chee Yong this evening, sharing his thoughts, his experiences and technical knowledge of how the works in “30^th Feb” were put together. As we know these prints were done over the course of 15 years, Chee Yong will bring us all into his dreams, or nightmares that haunted him over the last 15 years.

and now, over to Chee Yong.

Chee Yong:

I want to take this time and thank Kay Ngee for believing in what I want to do and what I’m doing, because I have shown these works to a gallery a number of years back, and they said no, we don’t want to show these. But I really thank god that it didn’t happen, as at that time I feel that I wasn’t even matured enough to show the whole collection and talk about it. It has just been really timely, so I would like to thank Kay Ngee and everybody else here.

Was really overwhelming last night when there were people outside hoping to come in, and inside everybody was so packed that they can’t move, so it’s quite exciting to see something like this happening, in Singapore and in photography. Tonight’s talk I really want to make it more relaxed, like what Kay Ngee said, to bring you into my mind… How? How did these even come out from my mind?

Uh, I think we dream more when we were younger. As we grew older, we forget our dreams, sometimes we intentionally forget our dreams and don’t want to think about it. I remembered when I was a kid, I never speak to my parents since the age of four, then I was taken away and so, from four till today, I’ve never spoken to my parents. They are like strangers to me. I had a guardian then, my guardian was very strict with me before and I couldn’t get out. If I have to walk out of that door, I have to ask their permission. To open the fridge and drink cold water, I have to ask their permission. Everything was like that, I felt I was in prison.

So I will be in my room crying, looking out of the window, like this. And I really felt like I was in prison and then I’ll start to dream what if I could just walk through these bars and do my escape. That happens very often and sometimes when I was lying on my bed, I thought I could just lift up my mattress, go in and I’ll be in another world.

My mind was filled with thoughts that I just want to get out of this place. I couldn’t get out of here. Just before my O Levels, I packed my bags and make a call to my dad telling him, I’m getting out of this place, I ‘m moving over to a friend’s house. And that’s what I did. So for many years, from 15 till I’m married till today I’ve been living on my own.

And that’s my life, it’s important because that’s how it affects me in the series. And so escapism was always on my mind, I want to be a magician, in the way I do things.

First Encounter with Dali

In 1991, the very first experience, I find myself in the St Petersburg Florida. I actually went there to play la (laughs), at Disneyland, Orlando, which is just about one and half hours drive. But on the way, my friends and I had this idea, hey! Let’s check things out. Let’s drive around. We started driving and oh! There’s Dali Museum here. Ok, let’s check it out. So I went in, looking at all the Dali paintings, drawings, sketches and whatever they have there, the sculptures. My jaws dropped, and I stayed the entire day there, I couldn’t get out. It was a very small museum, perhaps just about three times of this place. But it really provides me a lot of works in there.

And I started to ask myself, as I’ve been using photography for quite a while already. What if, I can do something like that in photography? How will people react? And so I ask my friends questions like, do you know how to do this? But they said, no I’ve never done this, you go and try it. So I thought, oh no, that’s not very good. So I started spending day and night, all day in the darkroom just to try to make things happen, putting images together. Now, this all started in 1990s, Photoshop came out in 1993. So this was pre-Photoshoping, there’s nothing you can do to merge images. I don’t think Photoshop was any good, till maybe about 5 years ago.

So, when I started merging these, things start to come to my mind. Things from the past started to surface. My dreams of walking through walls, through the window bars to escape my childhood prison, just like David Copperfield. Always wondering what if I could walk through impossible places, what will be on the other side? As you can see in these images, there’s always another side surfacing. But we don’t know, what’s going on the other side, we’re not told, of another side of life, of images.

How did I get my ideas? I said that I went to Dali’s Museum, back in 1991, and I understood the works of Escher. They were all surrealists, so I was really excited by the works of these artists, before being introduced to photographers. The works of these painters really affected me, so I was like, ok, let’s see, what can happen down the road.

And, the questions of ‘what ifs’ challenges us, just of how it goes about challenging us when confronted with these possibilities. So, I look at paintings a lot, sculptures a lot, to get ideas, I read books, flip through magazines. Sometimes, people think that I’m crazy with my fascination with things, like that towards a rock.

As you can see in my images, I used these four elements a lot: The rocks, water, the sky and windows. And these are symbols I’ve used throughout the images. And if I was to be at the beach and I saw a rock that intrigues me, I’ll start staring at it and take my time to examine it. So any passer-bys who saw me would be thinking, “This guy must be crazy”.

So whenever I passed by anything that interested me, I would stop and start examining carefully, which brought about many attentions from the passer-bys (laughs) a crowd of people will start gathering around me. When I start looking at these objects, I actually start seeing images. When I see them, I see Dali’s paintings, who actually painted something like that with the ants moving in and out of it. And I will start speculating, what if it is something else, these are maybe aliens.

So, I started to draw my imaginations on these objects which could possibly be impossible.

(to be continued)

30th Feb

30th February by Chow Chee Yong

30th February
Photographic Exhibition:
19 February – 15 March 2008

Opening Reception/Book Launch:
Friday 29 February 2008, 7:30pm

Q&A session: 30th February 2008, 7:30pm

Kay Ngee Tan Architects Gallery is pleased to present 30th February- the sixth solo exhibition by fine art photographer, Chow Chee Yong.

30th February is the product of a four-year long awaited inauguration by Chow. He was known for being the first of only three Singaporeans whose prints were acquired by the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (KMOPA). Chow’s works were further showcased by KMOPA alongside Nobuyashi Araki, Ansel Adams and Helmut Newton in his most recent group exhibition.

Drawing influences from the surrealists, most notably Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Op Artist MC Escher, Chow questions possibilities of subverting expectations of the experiences. These processes of questioning reality forms the catalyst of visual ideas that propels Chow to sketch, and thus beginning the recording and compilation of these photographic images necessary to make the non-existential alive. The collective of images were finally juxtaposed and fixed onto the final photographic print in the darkroom.

In Chow’s work, we experience surrealistic images that defy our notions of conventional perceptions. A swimmer freestyles through a ripped fence, another swimmer surfaces to inhale air in a strip of water in a building corridor; windows emerge in the midst of field; building columns taper off into buttress roots. These juxtaposed images fragmented of time and spaces, retain truly absolute to the artist’s imagination. Chow will be launching his first publication, titled 30th February alongside the exhibition opening reception. It showcases development in his art practice, images not publicly shown, and illustrations of the process to realizing his “personal belief that one’s imagination and the very private world of dreams must form the start of any creative work”, as quoted from the artist.

Chow graduated with a BFA (Hons) degree in Photography in 1994 from Western Michigan University, USA. The JCCI Art Scholar received his MA (Distinction) degree in Photography in 2001 from the Musashino Art University. He has held a number of solo and group exhibitions internationally in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the United States. Chow’s works have also been featured in numerous publications such as the Passages North (USA), OP Editions (Hong Kong), particularly the Nippon Camera and Asahi Camera in Japan. His works have also been compiled in two series under the titles of Light Trails and Things unseen, Places not been. Chow’s original prints can be found in various corporate, private and museum collections in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States. He is currently a photography lecturer in the Department of Visual Communication at The Temasek Design School, Temasek Polytechnic.

For further information, please contact Ee Peng or Tricia at gallery@kayngeetanarchitects.com or (65)64230198.

Joo Hong's Inks Opening Reception!

Joo Hong's Inks

Joo Hong's Inks

Opening reception: Wed 16th January, 7:00pm Gallery Hours:
Tuesdays to Fridays 11am-7pm,
Saturday 11am-6pm and by appointment
Lim Joo Hong: 1954-2005

Late artist Lim Joo Hong - who is known for the art working style of combining brush strokes and spatter marks on the computer - had artistic interests that originated in charcoal, watercolors, and Chinese ink painting.

On 16th Jan, to commemorate his life and his work, his daughter Tricia and wife Jessie will be organizing an exhibition, Joo Hong’s Inks, to showcase 24 of his early ink paintings.

Lim, who died at the age of 51, had a short and distinctive career as an artist after stepping down as the CEO of Singapore Computer Systems (SCS) in 2003. In his 20-year-long career in the information technology industry, he was a systems engineer and program manager with the Ministry of Defense before moving to the then National Computer Board. In the late 1990s, he helmed an Internet start-up company called Tricast. In 2003, he resigned after seven months as SCS' CEO, citing ill health stemming from hypertension and high cholesterol levels as the reason.

The father of three, who studied Chinese painting under cultural medallion winner Chua Ek Kay, was just beginning to attract critical and public interest as an artist when he collapsed at home after jogging on the night of Dec 28 last year.
His earlier work gives a modern spin on traditional Chinese brushwork and pushes the boundaries of the use of Chinese ink on rice paper. Through his art, Lim invites us to imagine forms within his brushwork - a rainfall, a palace, a swinging chandelier and interlocking leaves. In turn, he reveals to the audience his fascination with China (after living there from 1995 to 1998) and the rich western influences he was exposed to throughout his life.

The Singapore Art Museum had acquired two of his prints, Inside the Crystal Labyrinth and May, in 2003. He had also completed a commission of some 150 artworks for a new Four Seasons hotel in the Maldives.

Lim’s earlier exhibitions include Promise and Shared Passions (a two person show held with ceramist and wife, Jessie Lim) and Promise II, held posthumously in Singapore, Langkawi and Kular Lumpur. In 2006, Lim’s prints was featured in Hyper Design, the 6th Shanghai Biennale.

Lim has left behind dozens of works he tirelessly created throughout his life. These works are managed by his family, and can be found on http://www.limjoohong.com.

This exhibition will be opened by Mr. Kwok Kian Chow, Director of Singapore Art Museum, and ends on Tuesday, 12th February.

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陈家毅

我认识的林裕丰，中学时代开始就爱涂涂画画；当时学校有一份文艺刊物，还有一份年尾才派送，万生期待的校刊。 林裕丰的绘画与设计，往往就成了它令人眼前一亮的封面，总结了一整个年头，强而有力全校师生对外的呈辞。

校内的人也不觉得不寻常——这位相貌和蔼一点并不炫耀的理科生，艺术天份竟然如此不同凡响；或许科学家、物理学家，与艺术家对事物的好奇心与态度毕竟是一样的 : 默默耕耘在练习簿上的涂描，开拓结果的是一个令人意想不到崭新的境界。

许多年之后，经过牛津，住过北京；当过总裁，成家立业之后，半百之年的裕丰毅然放下世俗的繁华富贵，每天每天专注用神在宣纸上沾染水墨画彩，旁人恐怕不会明白，其实他正在点滴延续寻返青少年涂涂画画那段净真纯美的日子。

怀着科学家爱探索的精神他看到了数码打印可以跨越艺术的无穷潜质。 两年前展出的版画作品，是一次破天荒的尝试。 可惜真祗是那么的一次。 天嫉英才无奈又无情，让我们扼腕叹息。

在他版画创作的过程间我探望了他好几次，惊讶地发现鬼斧神功科学数码影相的背后竟另藏了一叠日夜辛勤的水墨真迹；那些浓稀液体滴染开来的形相，既属於传统中国画也属於西方抽象派的艺术。看似简单无奇的变形虫，目睹之后在我们的脑里逐渐发酵，化成医室里透明胶质检验盘上淌留的血迹，天空乍然散开笑脸式的烟花，那么含蓄温文尔雅，那么从容充裕丰姿，正正如其人。

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“裕丰遗墨”展

展期 ： 2008年1月16日 至2月12 日
时间 ： 星期二至五 – 11：00 至 19：00
星期六 – 11：00 至 18：00
地址 ： 陈家毅艺术空间
16-17 Duxton Hill Singapore 089600
Tel – 6423 0198 Fax – 6423 0197

MAGNUM MAGNUM IS FINALLY HERE!

Published in 7 languages throughout the globe, Magnum Magnum brings together the best work from acknowledged masters —among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eve Arnold, Marc Riboud, Werner Bischof and the rising stars of our time; Martin Parr, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Donovan Wylie and Chien-Chi Chang. This hardcover book edited by Brigitte Lardinois, comes in a breathtaking scale, giving the photos an impact never seen before in book form. It celebrates the vision, imagination and brilliance of Magnum photographers, marking the 60th birthday of the Magnum Group.

More information on this awesome book, and a great introduction by Martin Parr is featured on http://blog.magnumphotos.com/.

PS: Temporarily out of stock on Amazon, support the local art scene and grab you're copy at our gallery bookshop! Psst! Our 10% discount on all books is still on! Besides, think of how much you're saving on shipment! Whao.

Forum #4 - Identity: Women in Photography

(The much-awaited transcript)

Meridel Rubenstein:

Maybe we should introduce you, or perhaps you can introduce yourself.Thank you for coming, men, this is great.

I decided to do something a whole lot personal, not because it is more personal to be a woman, but I figured that there will be a lot of young women here and I notice that in Singapore people don’t tell their ages? But I will be in 59 in March. So if anyone wants to help me in this per say, you could say that you’re Chinese and you’re 16 right?

So I’ve become a photographer working for over 30 years, during a time when women did not have a voice, and women now have a voice.

So I think it would be interesting for you to see some of the things that I had to grabble with.

In 2001, I was offered a chance to make a book, a monogram of 20 yrs of work. This is my first book, the copies never arrived, and there is one in a bookstore somewhere. And I’m putting it here not to brag, but to say that it was a landmark for me and it is actually why I am in Singapore. Because imagine working for so long and then being able to put your work together and stand back to take a look at it. You know, in a new face of gathering again. This is like a huge breath even though it is work from different projects.

It is related to 911, because of the issues we humans save in the role. All over the world, people became really concerned with up-rootedness and people’s loss of the sense of belonging. So that was a real focus in my work. So what you’re seeing here is somewhat a 3-dimensional piece, about that size actually, a little bigger than that actually. But it is the transparency between glass, sand-blasted on the outside in a 19 century wood go go. And what you’re seeing is called volunteer, it is referring to transit in safely called ‘trees volunteer they just grow on their own’ as oppose to landing somewhere else. We call these self-grow, self-rooting trees volunteer. These are people that have come and gone from Vietnam as a result of the war, and I’m going to talk about the later image of sandblast image of more dug out, trees falling into water and stray people to and from, in times of war. Just to mention, this isn’t just the last few years even though the book came out in 2004, 2005 the night of a couple years of retrospective shows, so I’m just giving you a sense of something, but also a way for me to begin talking. So this is a piece from 1990, I work with a lot of materials, and materials are everything to me. It’s a little different in Singapore, because materials have a hard time here. Buying materials is hard here, with all the different languages.

These are all, whenever you see a brown and white print, it is made with a 19th century platinum plated process, where I take my negative and enlarge them add cold water color paper and you can use the sun for a UV light source. So when you see something like this, that is bigger than this, each print is about 20 x 24 inches, so you add it up, and it is about 7 feet tall. This is called Three Missiles, and it is about ( I have to tell you that I know what it is about after I do it) science and religion, religion made out of science, and how science is made out of religion. It is a feminist piece because; well I’m re-contextualizing my work for you today, because I want to talk about women. A man could have made this piece, but I as a young woman looking, I come from two parts of the US, and what I’m really gonna talk to you about is the emicicle. Because its was the home where I spent 30 years, and the home of the first people, the indigenous people, there are 70 indigenous tribes, over 70 in the US and probably over 15 of them are in the amicicle. So we have a sense of preservation culture, and then we have the… which is the home of the first atomic bomb was designed to be built. So as young woman, thinking about all those things, I thus conditioned myself, 20 years ago, I shall save you the details.

I want to read something, but just going back, I want to say that the prints are on watercolor paper, but then they are set in steel mount. They are hollowed out, so they are like giant pieces of net-board. And there’s text standing in the field, so there is black and white font, the left says white force, the middle says for element, and the right says physic space. Right up on the top. But steel and platinum together are two different kinds of metal; hard and soft, warm and cold (you see the detail now in some of the images). With this image I want to reconnect, our talk about women. I think it is very important to honor our elders, as women. Because I’m a father-identified girl, I am much more identified with my father than from my mother. But I know from this identification process that I’ve had, how important it is to collect women mentors, and honor them. I was named after a great writer, whom my parents didn’t know anything about; they just liked the way her named sounded, they thought she was dead, and I had the chance to meet her in amicicle, she came from Minnesota. Her name was Meridel the third and she lived to be (oh this is so wonderful); she lived to write until she was 89. This is something she wrote. She wrote about (so imagine an older women writing this, she wrote this when she was 70).

‘The body repeats the landscape; they’re the source of each other. We are marked by the seasonal body of earth, by the terrible migrations of people, by the swift turn of the century, virgin unchanged, never before experience on this rainy earth.’

Did I read too quickly? Is it ok? It is a beautiful poem, such a sense of time and place. And looking for her in the 20th century, she was someone who would watch the storms on television, and say ‘the earth wouldn’t stand for this any longer’. She has this sense of earth and body, the women’s body, earth and the relationships between them. Moving on, I’m honoring (to my friends that just came in), the matriarch in my life. On your right is an image I made called matriarch. A photo of an egg in the photo and one of Meridel the third, great grandmother. That was an early piece, I was just your age. This one on your left is a very important picture for me, it is of my mother-in-law, but she’s come to stand for, she was 92 in that picture. Here is how I used her, as the woman in the middle; I used her over and over as the ‘woman in the middle’. I’m going to talk about being the women in the middle. Here she is part of a piece about the world of a Native American and a nuclear scientist being woven together. And I’ll show you a bigger project on that.

Here in the matriarch on your left, with my mother on the left and my grandmother who came from Russia, she was an immigrant, and they came to Detroit, and I’ll tell you how Detroit was, what a sleepy town, a car city, where all the American cars was and factories, big factories, its like Singapore, an industrialized city. I was brought up in the farm on your right. Sorry I don’t have a great photograph, it was a beautiful farm with hundred of acres with cows and animals (Just so you know). In the funny hippie picture over there, which is a funny picture of the family I married into in New Mexico. And they don’t really look like that, but we were out on an outing, this is just a student picture many years ago, but this is showing you the landscape that I went from. I went from Detroit, to Singapore, to Vermont, going to New Mexico. Then my husband came with my high school daughters. That was that white sand where the first Atomic bomb was detonated. So that gives you a sense of the space, of the web southwest of the US, a very dramatic space for us, with all sorts of contradictions.

I was very lucky to have had a woman mentor, when I was only 15 in summer camp. A very great photographer called Wendy McNeil. She was very interested in resentlessness, so she liked to put pictures together. This time, with this man on your left, with his great-grandmother to see how faces are mapped. Right away, through Wendy and myself, I became quite interested in portraits. And I just want to mention another teacher I had, which was Minor White. I don’t have any good reproductions, but he was one of the great metaphoric using landscapes and abstractions from rocks, stones water. Just imagine a crystal of ice, and doing a close-up on that. This might be that, a close-up on a pattern on a rock. Very dramatic and very powerful photographer to study with.
This is me also being a student.

You have to imagine now, that I started photography as a student, and Wendy’s taken my work to Minor which happens to be at a place called MIT, very technological, and this is where they teach engineers how to be creative. With older men only, and all the men was photographing rocks and trees, so when I had a chance to take photographs, I went right away to where I thought there were rocks and trees, a place that was as far east as you can get in Newthanland. And I photographed rocks and trees, but I was able to find one woman subject, a girl in an abandoned house, a girl’s room. So I did my first year in photography as the only girl with a master in photography, amongst a group of men who wanted to be just like him. It was a very dynamic situation as I was the only girl, and who did portraits, so basically, they would just ignore me. I did try to make photographs of landscape, but really, I was interested in people. This was 1972, and I understood that I needed to support myself, as during this time, there weren’t galleries, and this obviously was not a commercial attempt, so I wasn’t going to be a commercial photographer. There wasn’t any example of women as studio photographers anyways, except for Diane Arbus.

So anyways, going to New Mexico and studying to learn to teach. So he sends me to New Mexico, and I take these romantic pictures. You must know that New Mexico is closer to California, so romantic pictures are not going to fly there at all.

But in any case, I went to study with this man and a few other men, but I happen to have a photograph of him. So for you who are interested in photography, this is Beaumont Newhall. Lot of time, his name gets loved because he’s old, he’s passed on, and he was the first person to write about the history of photography. He wrote the first book he did the first research by going to flea markets in Europe finding new photographs and piecing it all together and writing it down. This is one of his photographs. But as a young female student, what I did know was that there were only 11 women in this book of hundreds and hundreds of photographers. And when I said something, it was just a normal responses as the only women with this book, the rest were men who had wives making lunches for them, as the only girl you want to know where the other women went. So I went to the library to do research, at the Smithsonian restriction, telling them I’m covering 19th century photography, I was trying to find some sources.

I’m going to bring this up for everybody who are students, because as I was talking in my photo club, these are issues on woman who came up before other issues about your otherness, you’re differences in terms of ethnicity, religion, your gender preference or whatever.

To be Continued…