writings 2010s

Academic Writings and Publications

2010s

The work done for the book on Bintan in the early 2000s had all the components of a proper academic research, except that it was done outside Academia. But this first taste of historical and ethnographic rigour made me realise that scientific academic research was my calling. It made me accept "discipline", something I had rejected after running away from a ballet class at the age of five years old. With the Phoenix, as I like to call the Bintan book, I learned how to enjoy the stubborn determination required from historians and ethnologists to gather the pieces of a cultural puzzle one by one and see the picture of a resurrected moment in time slowly emerge. It made me relish in the patient search for the scattered parts of a narrative to thread the flow of its forgotten message in the present. By 2004, I knew that the unrelenting, obsessive quest for the long-awaited intellectual revelation of an elusive "truth" made me feel complete. The finished book said how much I had I enjoyed every bit of the process, even the tedious finishing-line of footnote editing, the brainless exercise without which a paper is not completed.

In 2006, the Phoenix was followed by a proper academic thesis written for my master, a research on the ruined castle of Omer de Valbelle in my mother's village that combined theory of photography and 18th century cultural history. By 2007, I was an academic staff with all the right credentials in LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. The same year, I started teaching a photography class for the School of Art, Design and Media in Nanyang Technological University. This is when I encountered the character of Jules Itier. With him, the pieces of the puzzle finally came together to form a coherent picture: history and theory of photography, European and Asian cultural history, colonialism, society of image and globalisation made the topics. Travel writing and pictorial field-work shaped the practice. These concerns have formed the framework of my writing and publication activities since then. Started as personal project, the research on Itier proved to be substantial enough to receive in 2013 a major research grant from LASALLE that allowed me to retrace his journey done in 1844-45 around Asia. The research was concluded in 2015 with a major paper in the prestigious journal History of Photography. The travel photojournalistic work that had supported me throughout the 80s and 90s had reached an altogether different level.

2006 - Valbelle, Myth of Fiction? Reading Photography as a Myth.

Master thesis on the apparition of the photographic concept in relation to the development of the English garden landscape design in the second half of the 18th century. Completed in 2006 under the supervision of Adeline Kueh for the Master of Arts - Fine Arts,
Open University - LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

2009 - Photography: a Historical Perspective.

Article in the catalogue of the exhibition Transport Asian - Visions of Contemporary Photography from South East Asia,
Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.

2009 - Performance in Frame: the Historical Perspective.

Article in the catalogue of the exhibition Performance in Frame on the relation between photography and performance art, presented for the 2009 edition of the performance art festival Fetter Field, presented in Singapore Management University.

2012 - Between Legend and Reality: the Bukit Batu Cemetery of the Island of Bintan, Riau Archipelago.

Article on the Bukit Batu cemetery of Bintan, published in Archipel, the journal of the Ecole Française d'Extrème Orient with a focus on South East Asia. It includes the archeological study of the site, followed by the transcript and analysis of local legends concerning the historical characters of the Sejarah Melayu allegedly buried there. This narrative was received from Pak Atan, the keeper of the cemetery.

2014 - To Cut or Not to Paste, that is the Question.

Article first written in 2009 for the conference on Computational Photography and Aesthetic organised by the Institute of Media Innovation, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Published in the catalogue of the exhibition COS•MO that I curated around the concept of the Constant Self-Recording Mode and presented in the Institute of Contemporary Art of Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.

2014 - Joseph Mary Callery, le Passeur de Monde.

Article on the interpreter of the 1844 Treaty of Whampoa between France and China, commissioned by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be included in the book La Chine, une Passion Française, Loubatières, Paris, 2014.

2015 - The Elusive Image Rising Over The Horizon -
"Valbelle, Myth or Fiction?": recontextualising the legacy of an 18th century aristocrat.

Article first written for the lecture-performance Adapting Tiphaigne that opened the conference Citizens of the World, Adapting (in) the 18th century organised in 2012 by the Singapore Nanyang Technological University. Selected for the book Citizens of the World edited by Rownan and Littlefield and published by Bucknell University Press, 2015.

2015 - Dans les pas de Jules Itier

Article in Une Autre Histoire de la Photographie, Musée Français de la Photographie, Flammarion, Paris, 2015.

2015 - Jules Itier and the Lagrené Mission

History of Photography, Taylor and Francis, Oxford, 2015

2019 - Placing Jules Itier's body of work in perspective

International Journal on Stereo and Immersive Media, Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa, 2019.