"The magic in the intersection of time, light, life — and fate — still fascinates me, but I’m asking myself: whose truth is it, whose reality, whose fragile memories?" - Sim Chi Yin
Sim Chi Yin (born 1978 in Singapore) is an artist whose research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, memory and extraction.
The granddaughter of a photographer and journalist killed during China's civil war, this personal history— taboo in her family for decades during the Cold War eventually drew Chi Yin back to China from her native Singapore. For 11 years she was based in this rapidly changing country, forging intimate bonds with people and chronicling its metamorphosis from the ground up. She is now newly based in Berlin.
Chi Yin read history at the London School of Economics and Political Science for her first two degrees, and was a staff journalist and foreign correspondent for a decade before quitting to become an independent visual practitioner in 2011. She is currently also a PhD candidate on scholarship at King's College London, in War Studies.
Recent solo exhibitions include One Day We’ll Understand, Les Rencontres d’Arles (2021), One Day We’ll Understand, Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden (2020), One Day We’ll Understand, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019) and Most People Were Silent, Institute of Contemporary Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (2018), Fallout, Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017).
We met her during the 2021 edition of Les Rencontres de la photographie in Arles. On that occasion, she kindly answered our questions.
You showed the “Rat Tribe” series in 2012 in Arles, how do you feel exhibiting here again?
I’ve almost forgotten it [laugh]! I think it was a projection. Coming for the first time to Arles was super interesting and everyone kept on telling me “you have to go to Arles”. I never made it because coming from Asia to Europe is quite an expense and it’s a big trip, so actually I’ve never made it until now.
This year, I was also very conflicted in going because of Covid and because I have to leave my baby behind for the first time since I had him. I made a five-day four-nights trip. It was definitively worthy going. When you have a solo show, it always makes sense to go.
Are you happy with your solo show exhibited in Arles this year?
I think it was challenging because I should have been around for installation, but this year it wasn’t possible. There were many things that had to be worked out remotely. The curator [Sam I-Shan, a Singaporean curator now based in Cambodia] and I worked to come up with a 3D SketchUp down to the centimetre. But in the end, of course, there were things that happened during the hang that were unexpected: for instance there was a big switch on one of the walls that wasn’t in the floor plans and so we had to re-organize one wall, the lighting was a little bit imperfect as there were strange shadows on one of the walls. But overall I think the team did a very good job and worked very hard, the curator also took on the role of championing this work. I’m grateful to the team and Arles for having worked in under very unusual circumstances and had to produce a very nice festival. I think my hang was very satisfactory in the end.
I knew the building was unique, a very historic building [Sim Chi Yin’s exhibition was at the Benedictine abbey of Montmajour]. To be there and to feel the building, to feel how this work lives in this space is really interesting. In particular the sound of the two songs — the two channel video installations — and how it cocoons in this very heavy stone building, and how it travels out into the corridors, to the chapel next door, into the courtyard outside, it’s very fascinating to me to hear these Chinese lyrics travelling through this French Benedictine monastery from the tenth century, it has a very interesting effect. Perhaps that song resonated particularly for the French audience, originally it was a French song, if you are a French person of a certain age you would recognize the tune. The context of it is important as well, because when I showed it in Singapore, nobody knew what this song was. Even if I show it in China now, I think people would not know what the song is. Astonishingly, when I showed this installation at the Guangzhou Image Triennial earlier this year [in April 2021], they censored the song.
From my impression, the people that make the effort to travel out there [the venue is located on the outskirts of the city of Arles] seem to come away with good things to say about the show. Being there the first week, it seems well received. And during the guided tour, several people stayed for a long time to ask questions, they seemed engaged with the work, and that was interesting for me also.
Several of your projects were created and exhibited in China, you notably won the 2020 Jimei x Arles Discovery Award. How is the Chinese audience reacting to your images?
I don’t really know because I don’t get to go. For instance at Jimei x Arles International Photography Festival, I exhibited a different body of work that was curated by Liu Xiao. She is a curator and professor at the Hangzhou Central Academy of Fine Art. I’ve never met her as I was on maternity leave, but she mentioned she was interested in curating a show with my work for Jimei x Arles Festival. She came up with this idea to curate my nuclear work [“Most People Were Silent” series] and my sands work [“Shifting Sands” series] together. I thought it was quite an interesting idea. The nuclear work was shown in multiple places around the world as a solo show, while the sand one was meant to be shown in a group show on infrastructure around the world in Arles last year [2020]. Of course Arles cancelled last year.
I like working with curators that come with different perspective on my work. It makes it more interesting for me. Otherwise, it’s just me and my own head, and there are limitations. I enjoy working with other people who can bring something different, see different things in my work, and present it in a different way.
I was really curious when she said she wanted to use the video installation of the Nuclear work for the Sand work. I was quite hands-off I have to say for that show, as I was struggling already with the baby and being a geriatric new mum, I trusted her. I didn’t realize it was part of a competition. Some way down the line, I got a contract from the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre [founder of the festival] saying I was part of a contest. She opened the show on my behalf and then she phoned me one day when I was changing a diaper. She said “you just won the dajiang [meaning grand prize in Chinese]”, I was really surprised! I knew the relation between Jimei and Arles but not in close detail, so I was very happy when they called and said that I have to do a show in Arles. Often times the person who won this prize shows the same body of work in Arles. But I decided I wanted to show this other body of work that I’ve been making more recently, I’m actively doing different parts of the project.
That was completely unexpected, I don’t really pay attention to prizes that closely, the prize culture within photography and art is not unproblematic. It was thanks to Liu Xiao’s initiative who wanted to do a show of mine, it was her curation that won the prize, I’m grateful to her for that.
How about your visual practice-based PhD at King’s College London, is that connected to your show in Arles?
The exhibition in Arles is the latest chapter of a long project I’ve been doing, which starts from family history but is really an exploration of the historiography of this anti-colonial war in British Malaya. I’ve been working on this since the last eight or nine years, I’ve done different pieces of this project for different things. The first solo show was in Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong in 2019: we did a show around the songs as well as the landscapes, which are sites of memory around Malaysia and Thailand from this war. The show in Arles was the first time I showed the interventions I made on the archives. The PhD is on this project as well, the representation of the left, the combatants, the guerrilla fighters.
I started the PhD in October 2018, but I’ve been in a long interruption since last year for maternity and Covid reasons. I passed the first Viva that upgrades you from Mphil to PhD status. I’ve done a bunch of archival work but I’m at around one-third of the process. I’m in the War Studies Department. This department in King’s College has never had a practice-based PhD before so a lot of things are not very clear, but they are in principle allowing me to submit artworks, documentation and shows that I make during this period of research. I still have to write a piece of thesis, a very long one, the same like everybody else, but in addition I am including documentation of the shows and books I’m making in the meantime.
Speaking of which, we saw you published a self-edited book recently. Tell us more about your relationship with the book format.
I’m making three books from this project, working with the Dutch book designer Teun van der Heijden. We’ve been collaborating for a number of years, and we’ve been working very slowly on this series of books. I self-published the first book, it came out in Arles this June actually. That book has some connection to China because it focuses on my grandmother and her husband, who was the one executed by the Guomindang [the Chinese Nationalist Party] upon returning to China. The second book is going to be hopefully out within the next year. We’re still working on it. I’m still looking for a publisher. The second book looks at my grandfather and the broader histories around the so-called Malayan Emergency. The third book deals with the archive, the missing voices in the archive as well as the colonial archive.
Most of my work in the last few years has been focusing much more on exhibition making and book making. But I also do a 15-minute performative reading from this project. I’ve done it in several places, including New York, Amsterdam, London, and Singapore. Now I have the invitation of a theatre in Singapore to turn it into a full-length performance, an hour-long performance, a “one-women-docu-show” whatever you want to call it.
The performance came out from a need to explain this obscure war. I was on a residency in 2017 in Amsterdam called Docking Station. I basically arrived on Monday, and they said to me “you have to give a talk on lunchtime on Thursday to the Dutch Film Institute”. Dutch people probably have no idea where Malaya is, they would not have heard about this war. So how do I explain this very complex story involving my own family but also involving ten of thousands of other people and other lives? And I only had thirty minutes to do so. This is how the performative reading happened. I was trying to figure out what is an efficient way to get people to access to this complex and remote story. So I came up with this idea that I write a letter to my grandfather. I was pleasantly surprised that the performance leaves members of the audience in tears, whether it was in New York, Amsterdam, London or Singapore. I realised there was something about the form of live storytelling. Sitting there in an armchair with theatrical lighting with a granddaughter reading a letter to her grandfather makes people find resonance in their own minds and hearts, it echoes with their own stories.
I’ve become quite interested in the affect of performance, that’s something else I’m exploring. I’ve been trying to move out just the photographic realm for the last few years. I’ve found there are other ways I can speak, other ways I can be interesting in my storytelling. My works still begin from the image, but it goes to multiple forms now.
Do you have any advice to young photographers who want to do long-form documentary projects?
Wow [sights], find another job [laugh]! You have to be very determined, find something you really care about, you almost have to be truly obsessive about it because it takes a lot out of you, not just financially and in terms of time but there’s a certain emotional labour that comes with this form of work. I would say choose very carefully what subject matter you’re diving into, be very tenacious about it, and then think in multi-forms. Don’t only think about the linear photo-essay, don’t just think about single images that hang on the wall. Think about the scope of your project, the scale of it, whether it has potential to be spanned into different pieces and different forms. I can’t say I recommend to anybody working on a project for ten years, going crazy with it and ending up doing a PhD, a performance and books [laugh]!
I think though long-term projects are very valuable today because we live in a world of information saturation. It’s almost like it’s the wrong time to be doing long-form and in-depth work that require people to spend time and slow down to understand the work. It’s almost antithetical to the time, but I think that’s also why it’s valuable.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on the second book and the third book. I’m working on turning the performance into a full-length one, I’ve got in a dramaturge, a producer and a production company, we are working on getting funding and appointing a director to make this happen. Hopefully, it can premiere in 2024. In the immediate future, I’m working on this next show in the Zilberman Gallery in Berlin in September [exhibition “One Day We’ll Understand” from 14/09/2021 to 27/11/2021]. I try to balance all of this with life, with geriatric motherhood, it’s a daily challenge for sure.
More information: chiyinsim.com
