Light Shade and Emotions

Pedagogical Globalization: Traditions, Contemporary Art, and Popular Culture of Korea, 2017

This chapter suggests that Korean contemporary art be used as a cross-cultural resource to enhance K-12 students' understanding of their everyday lives, by exploring others' cultures. The main focus is the artwork of Atta Kim, who uses photography to find answers to his questions about the meaning of life and existence. Buddhist theories and concepts play a critical role in his artistic practice. This essay particularly emphasizes the New York Series and the DMZ Series for his ON-AIR Project. People tend to recognize the real value of people and objects that surround them only after they are gone. By visually creating a scene that then undergoes the action of vanishing through an old, simple photo technique, Kim asks viewers about the real meaning of human existence. Students can reflect on their own life stories, cultures, and history, while viewing, exploring, and interpreting Kim's photographs.

In studies, essays and commentaries covering photography-based images, a consensus appears to be forming that in the last two decades, the status of the photograph in museums has undergone a radical change. 1 As we become increasingly accustomed to a visualisation based on mechanical images in our everyday routines of socialising and communication, as well as in the natural and social sciences, 2 photography as a particularly artistic medium has emerged as a surface for dealing with traditional questions of pictoriality, such as referenciality, authenticity, the passing-on of traditions and medial reflection.

Reflect/Refract: Essays on Photography in Singapore, 2013

Veins of Influence, Colonial Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in Early Photographs and Collections, 2023

The argument built around a ‘veins of influence’ analysis takes a reconstructive approach to contextualize and interpret colonial era photographs of Ceylon. This construct examines the dynamics implicit in the image and takes into account historiography, biographies of collectors and the idiosyncrasies of the social context of which are best understood by identifying for whom these photographs were intended. This analytical approach is not new; in assessing other cultural objects, this is best practice. However, recognizing how vital it is to understand these ‘veins’ when studying photographic material and that which John Berger so aptly termed ‘ways of seeing’, offers fresh methodology. This writing will also place the still unfamiliar early colonial era photography of Ceylon within a broader geographical discourse about world photography. In these pages, Ganendra surveys more than 450 early photographs of colonial Sri Lanka, from important collections, most of which have never been published or otherwise come into the public view, until now. Her focus on the collecting dynamic provides novel perspectives that humanize the image through the nature of their collectors and their related journeys. Images featured are from the: Royal Collection Trust; Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; Royal Commonwealth Society, Cambridge University Library; Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Trustees of the Rothschild Archives. In addition to these UK collections, the publication includes early photographs from important local family collections and period publications and works by Julia Margaret Cameron. The collections are mainly those of ‘influencers’ and the writing considers images by both studio photographers and hobbyists, for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

The visual residue, or images that make-up the photographs displayed by Prof. Kong Ho and Dr. Martie Geiger-Ho in their joint exhibition, A Slice of Light: A Stroke in Time, are only “finished” in the sense that they are recorded and “fixed” exposures printed on paper that can be seen through countess viewings by any number of viewers. However, how each person responds to the images assembled in this brochure that serves as both documentation of the exhibition, and as a kind of “souvenir” from the exhibition event itself, depends on each viewer’s own recollections and familiarity with first: photography as an art form; and second, their appreciation of simple and often over-looked creatures and their habitats that commonly inhabit a place like the Temburong rainforest. While the highly manipulated photographs of Ho differ in temperament and intension from Geiger-Ho’s more direct and focused representations of landscapes and single framed compositions of insects and leaves, both phot...

2021

The following article reviews a collection of photography on view at an exhibition named The Story of Light and Shadow: 20th Century Chinese Photography from Huang Jianpeng's Collection at the National Art Museum of China. Though an exhibition on Chinese photography, it included a sizable collection of Tibet-related photographs taken by early Han Chinese photographers during the early 20th century. Through a brief review of existing scholarship on photography of Tibet and a close reading of the works of Zhuang Xueben, one of the earliest Han Chinese photographers who took photos in Tibetan regions, we see how images produced during the early 20th century in Tibet are coded with layered agencies and complex motivations. Preliminarily contextualizing Zhuang Xueben’s photo-taking aspirations, I argue that early photographers of Tibet are embodiments of complex, overlapping and if not yet incongruous motivations – a complication of their own independent perspectives and professional...