UNDER THE SUN
(2023)

    I drown in a million faces. Traversing through a space of familiar uncertainty I find myself being afraid of looking— am I really seeing? Women and girls, of whom all so familiar, looking, but to who? Who are they? Where are they? Is it necessary to know? Images of ubiquitous Southeast Asian women in a post- war landscape bring this claustrophobic and nauseating feeling of seeing confronting faces after faces, melding into one another, the vulnerability of their appearances. The burden of history shapes our perception and delineates identity. Can an image ever be free of this burden? Can they become a vessel and reflect whatever the environment they might be in? - this is the burden that the audience must bear.

    To ask these questions, the image must no longer a tool to understand but a surface we can all see. Images allows for one to look just a bit longer, ask a few more questions - of oneself, of what they're looking at. It forces a person to question what they believe in and what they think they know. What a face, like any others, is trying to tell the viewer of; what might bring of these forfeit of photographic perfection, the hindrance of emotions, indifference in each gaze. It draws a parallel from contemporary aesthetic nodes of judgement to the landscapes that these images are being put in and cue the viewer’s interpretation. Each image sits and ponders at once with one - it is to speculate and surrender to the image - it is the gap between knowing and seeing.