Moving Pictures, Disturbed Realities.

2002

​Giant images flashing across the cityscape are a rather distinctive feature of Singapore urban life. Because of a limitation on advertising billboards, the local advertising industry was forced to explore other potential supports for the poster campaigns. The answer was found in a fruitful collaboration with the bus companies. At first timid and restricted to standard square images pasted on the available plain surfaces of the bus, the designs progressively evolved to fully utilise the shape of the support with bold collages and compositions. The result of this approach turns the whole vehicle into a new image of its own, which goes out to interact with its counterparts in a forever changing graphic ballet animating the streets of the island-city.
 
There is a deep paradox at work in this process, a paradox that epitomises the evolution of the consumer society we live in, relentlessly feeding itself on its own image.  In many cases what we actually see passing before us is nothing less than the image of an image of an image; a seemingly harmless but in fact rather potent embodiment of the much touted about virtual reality slowly shaping up before our eyes.

Photography was indeed an important step of the fabrication of virtual reality, or rather the perception of reality as virtual. Humanity had unknowingly embarked on this quest when it first felt the need to represent its perception of the world, giving it meaning by symbolising it. After many tribulations, photography was the first medium to give a perfect illusion of reality, while falling short of truly being it. It is only the image of reality. Painting too is an image but rather works in an opposite direction. The image most often comes from the virtual world, from imagination, but the texture and matter of the paint somehow makes it much more “real” than photography.

In this body of work, the paint work complementing the original photograph aims at questioning the elusive border between image and reality upon which the phenomenon of the moving images of Singapore streets rest. As the image of an image of an image of an image is re-worked with paint, where does the final layer of this disturbed reality rest?

Acrylic Paint and Digital Print on Canvas

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Complete write-up

​Giant images flashing across the cityscape are a rather distinctive feature of Singapore urban life. Because of a limitation on advertising billboards, the local advertising industry was forced to explore other potential supports for the poster campaigns. The answer was found in a fruitful collaboration with the bus companies.
 
At first timid and restricted to standard square images pasted on the available plain surfaces of the bus, the designs progressively evolved to fully utilise the shape of the support with bold collages and compositions. The result of this approach turns the whole vehicle into a new image of its own, which goes out to interact with its counterparts in a forever changing graphic ballet animating the streets of the island-city.
 
There is a deep paradox at work in this process, a paradox that epitomises the evolution of the consumer society we live in, relentlessly feeding itself on its own image.  In many cases what we actually see passing before us is nothing less than the image of an image of an image; a seemingly harmless but in fact rather potent embodiment of the much touted about virtual reality slowly shaping up before our eyes.
 
The nature of photography is to freeze time by capturing the motion and space of life in a two dimensional image made of the very light that was cast on the subject at the moment of the shutter’s release. It encapsulates the reality of a specific moment, a reality that then goes on to live a life of its own, as if floating at the surface of the time-space continuum.
 
The process finds a particularly decisive expression with the moving images travelling at the surface of Singapore’s reality. The nation prides itself of being at the forefront of technological developments. If anything, the phenomenon of those moving images on buses says how deep this has gone into our perception of everyday life.
 
The still images of moving objects find themselves to be moving again. The cinema is in the street. We have entered... the movie. And so are the people in the buses... they have entered the images. Those images have gone through a complex process of transmutation while being scanned, digitalized, magnified and printed. Reality has indeed become virtual. Maybe it always was but we just couldn’t see it.
 
Photography was indeed an important step of the fabrication of virtual reality, or rather the perception of reality as virtual. Humanity had unknowingly embarked on this quest when it first felt the need to represent its perception of the world, giving it meaning by symbolising it. After many tribulations, photography was the first medium to give a perfect illusion of reality, while falling short of truly being it. It is only the image of reality. Painting too is an image but rather works in an opposite direction. The image most often comes from the virtual world, from imagination, but the texture and matter of the paint somehow makes it much more “real” than photography.
 
In this body of work, the paint work complementing the original photograph aims at questioning the elusive border between image and reality upon which the phenomenon of the moving images of Singapore streets rest. As the image of an image of an image of an image is re-worked with paint, where does the final layer of this disturbed reality rest?