Bophana workshop with HEMAN CHONG
{ January 13, 2010 @ 1:40 pm } { Comments (1) }
Yesiree, he’s back from the dead! And he’s promised to deliver a workshop consisting principally of showing 1,000 photos!
This turned out to be a lot better than I expected. Heman’s conceptualism can be a trifle inaccessible in Singapore, but here he explained his work really well, in the context of the archive, with specific reference to his "God Bless Diana" project[http://www.hemanchong.com/2004/2004gbd.html]. Basically, he’d take photographs of found art – regular small camera shots of interesting arrangements, sculptures, installations and postures left out in the streets of the cities he travelled to. Budapest, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Singapore, Linz. The title’s from the first item that started it off, a cutout of a face of Princess Di attached to a bouquet, left in memoriam by the highway in Paris. [May be getting some of these facts wrong, mind you.]
He presented his final collection in the form of a shop somewhere in the Netherlands, where he sold his images as limited edition postcards. And people would buy them, curious because no explication existed on the back of the cards save for the title of the project, and so they’d quiz him on the origins.
Heman: The feedback would also help make sense of the archive. And I think that’s where the connection would matter. And actually I got sent my own postcard. (laughs)
He also presents images from an upcoming exhibition called "Calendar". Same thing, only now it’s shots of empty rooms across the world.
Ashok: Is there any way in which this could fail? As in if I fail to watch 3,000 films, that would fail. Or you could fail to sell the postcards. Is there anything you could learn from?
Heman: Yeah. I think I’m also very conscious about the limitations of an image. Like for this project, the biggest failing is I can never bring you to the space. It’s just an image, so it only exists on that level. And there are many trappings in this kind of situation as well.
He’s not just talking about archives, though. He ventures into storymaking:
Heman: I really like this thing that Kurt Vonnegut wrote.
He brings out a slide from pages 9-10 of Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction. It’s eight rules for writing a short story. These, he says, are the rules that uses to govern almost all his artworks, even single photos.
Heman: Actually I follow number 7 very closely:
"7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."
He gives them enough time to read it all, too. They get a little confused about the cockroaches in number 8, but he reassures them that it’s just a joke.
Tim and Vlatka start to chime in on the craft of storymaking: start when you’re close to finishing, he says. Sometimes these things become projects, she says, and sometimes they become short stories and sometimes they don’t. And it’s all good.
Heman: That’s why I show all of it. I don’t say this is what the work is about. It’s a mess. And maybe the mess is the clarity.
Heman: You have to create a habit. it’s like existence, to crreate for yourself.
Heman: I think the key is to make it… It’s also to decide whether you want to do it or not. and me, I’m the kind of guy who says, fuck it, just do it.
Heman: So for me it’s just a way of like thinking through this thing that you do all the time. Like why am I doing this, why am I doing this? Afterwards it becomes a way of thinking through life, and on this level you have this wonderful archive of a thousand rooms for example. And actually it can start with a very small basis of something. Maybe you can photograph every signpost. And there was one time I wanted to photograph every… you know the traffic islands? It’s like a triangle between two big roads? I wanted to photogarph all the traffic islands for example.
Heman: I think what’s really really important is to find something that would mean somethign to your context and what you’re interested in. And it’s actually a way of storytelling, and it’s actually very wonderful to tell a story of your connections. Very childlike.
Heman: The reason I’m showing all this work is based on two things. When I was at Bhopana, it seemed like this process where you’re trying to uncover, to get bAck all these images. And I think that’s a wonderful process that should be done. But I think what should be done is to engage Bhopana in your own context. Like if one day you show up with a thousand images of your own.
Heman: For me it’s not the point what you can do with what you have now. For example, you can start today. I give you a super-simple example. I have a friend, he’s an artist in singapore. From 2000 onwards, he photographed everything he ate. All the food, everything he ate.
Heman: I just showed it. 10 years of food in an exhibition. And it’s just everything he ate. And if he misses a meal, he will show a black slide. I mean, it’s low-budget. and over time, you can really see from the photos he’s eating very badly, very badly. Like why is the food always fried? Fried chicken, fried noodles. But you can tell he’s a very social person because he’s always eating with friends. So the colelciton starts to have a story, because after the 50th photo, there’s a story.
Heman: So for me, the idea of making up a story, it’s super-insteresting, and it can be done on a personal level. It’s not like making a film where you need a cameraman and everything. It’s like life. It’s a very little gap.
Ng Yi-Sheng