Lee Chang Ming email Interview with Harviran Singh
This interview is conducted as part of NUS Museum’s 2023 Summer Programme ‘Book Club’ sessions. Interns were tasked to craft a series of questions following a guided tour of the PJOC exhibition, bringing in multiple perspectives in the reading of the artworks
About the artist
Lee Chang Ming, an alumnus of the Department of Communications & New Media at NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, is an artist from Singapore who works across photography, publishing, video, and writing. With an interest in themes such as intimacy, gender, environment, and the everyday, Lee's practice contemplates the subjective act of looking and the photographic medium as a process, exploring ideas of optics and haptics. He also runs Nope Fun, an independent publisher and platform focusing on photography and contemporary image making. He is currently an MFA student in the Environmental Art & Social Practice programme at UC Santa Cruz.
About the intern
Harviran Singh is a Year 2 Masters Applied and Public History student at NUS, he was the NUS Baba House intern from September 2022 - August 2023 assisting in research and content development for NUS Baba House programmes.
︎︎︎ Click here to find out more about Lee Chang Ming’s ‘Chromatic’ ︎︎︎
HS: How does the usage of the Silk Charmeuse in the
exhibition, speak to your understanding of the ‘materiality of film’?
Printing on fabric speaks more generally to the materiality of photographs. In everyday life, we often look at photos for their subject matter depicted in print or on our screens but not always for the physical properties of how the photos are presented. I wanted to print on Silk Charmeuse for several reasons. First, to relate to the fluid feeling of the sea. Second, to relate to the idea of degradation, transience, and mortality. The print is left suspended and unframed, and over time the edges fray as it is handled or moved around. I wanted to evoke this sense of vulnerability in the same way the film was easily corroded by seawater. If we think of the film as a recording medium to document memories, then it’s an appropriate metaphor to think about how our memories and bodies are also fragile and transient.
HS: Looking at Figure A below (which stood out to me), a few elements are observable (the vivid colours, the wave-like imprints and the dotted patterns). What would a detailed interpretation of such a work be to you?
What I liked about the images when I first saw them was that it was unexpected and abstract. Also, I got the images as scans of a whole roll. I don’t want to prescribe an interpretation for specific images but rather hint or suggest my personal relation to the series and installation as a whole. That’s why the text on the postcard is an important part of the work for me — to give a clue as to how I relate to the images even as I leave it open to interpretation. The selection of images to show was more of an intuitive process.
HS: You mentioned that the images connect the ‘materiality of film and the notion of life and death’. How is this so?
‘Chromatic’ was initially created because I accidentally soaked photographic film in the sea when I wanted to take underwater photos. The seawater reacted with the chemicals on the film surface to cause this unexpectedly colourful result. Reflecting on this, I realised it related to an earlier incident when I almost drowned in the sea as a kid. I had a near-death experience and vividly remember seeing a tunnel of colourful light. Of course, this experience is just a personal anecdote, but if we think of the film as material or corporeal, and how all the moments I tried to capture underwater were destroyed because of a mistake, then it is kind of a "death". Both a kind of death of the moments I tried to capture and death of the photographic materials which were corroded by the sea. Perhaps we could say the afterlife is beautiful or that it was like that near-death experience I had? But maybe that's a bit of a stretch!
At the same time, looking at film as a material object rather than simply a medium to record, the project, to a smaller extent, also raises questions about photographs as mediums to depict reality or truth. Looking at images in our everyday life, it's easy to overlook aspects of photographic images besides what is depicted, that they are pixels on a screen or ink on paper - materials used for representation.
HS: Do you feel like abstract images/ photographs provide an avenue to process memories?
Not really. But I think the process of making the work as a whole (the writing, conceptualizing, contemplating how to show the images) does help to process the memories. In some ways, for this project, the memories as mentioned in the postcard text are an anchor that brings the abstraction back to the lived experience. Likewise, the way I try to present the work as large prints on fabric and on small intimate postcards evokes and ties back to this specific memory. So in spending all this time realizing this project over the years, it has helped to make meaning from those memories. In other words, the process of making the work helps in the processing.
Printing on fabric speaks more generally to the materiality of photographs. In everyday life, we often look at photos for their subject matter depicted in print or on our screens but not always for the physical properties of how the photos are presented. I wanted to print on Silk Charmeuse for several reasons. First, to relate to the fluid feeling of the sea. Second, to relate to the idea of degradation, transience, and mortality. The print is left suspended and unframed, and over time the edges fray as it is handled or moved around. I wanted to evoke this sense of vulnerability in the same way the film was easily corroded by seawater. If we think of the film as a recording medium to document memories, then it’s an appropriate metaphor to think about how our memories and bodies are also fragile and transient.
HS: Looking at Figure A below (which stood out to me), a few elements are observable (the vivid colours, the wave-like imprints and the dotted patterns). What would a detailed interpretation of such a work be to you?
What I liked about the images when I first saw them was that it was unexpected and abstract. Also, I got the images as scans of a whole roll. I don’t want to prescribe an interpretation for specific images but rather hint or suggest my personal relation to the series and installation as a whole. That’s why the text on the postcard is an important part of the work for me — to give a clue as to how I relate to the images even as I leave it open to interpretation. The selection of images to show was more of an intuitive process.
HS: You mentioned that the images connect the ‘materiality of film and the notion of life and death’. How is this so?
‘Chromatic’ was initially created because I accidentally soaked photographic film in the sea when I wanted to take underwater photos. The seawater reacted with the chemicals on the film surface to cause this unexpectedly colourful result. Reflecting on this, I realised it related to an earlier incident when I almost drowned in the sea as a kid. I had a near-death experience and vividly remember seeing a tunnel of colourful light. Of course, this experience is just a personal anecdote, but if we think of the film as material or corporeal, and how all the moments I tried to capture underwater were destroyed because of a mistake, then it is kind of a "death". Both a kind of death of the moments I tried to capture and death of the photographic materials which were corroded by the sea. Perhaps we could say the afterlife is beautiful or that it was like that near-death experience I had? But maybe that's a bit of a stretch!
At the same time, looking at film as a material object rather than simply a medium to record, the project, to a smaller extent, also raises questions about photographs as mediums to depict reality or truth. Looking at images in our everyday life, it's easy to overlook aspects of photographic images besides what is depicted, that they are pixels on a screen or ink on paper - materials used for representation.
HS: Do you feel like abstract images/ photographs provide an avenue to process memories?
Not really. But I think the process of making the work as a whole (the writing, conceptualizing, contemplating how to show the images) does help to process the memories. In some ways, for this project, the memories as mentioned in the postcard text are an anchor that brings the abstraction back to the lived experience. Likewise, the way I try to present the work as large prints on fabric and on small intimate postcards evokes and ties back to this specific memory. So in spending all this time realizing this project over the years, it has helped to make meaning from those memories. In other words, the process of making the work helps in the processing.