Something Similar
by Chua Chye Teck & Liu Liling
The digital world, smartphones and social media have become a fundamental part of our lives today. With this shift, photography has evolved to become a form of communication where visuals are used to interact with one another in lieu of text, at the same time allowing for further interpretations of the images themselves as an artistic form. In the same vein, Chua Chye Teck and Liu Liling have maintained an image-based correspondence through social messaging platforms and this project is a result of these dialogues as an invitation to rethink their relationship with photography and image-making today.
What is photography in today’s context?
How do we approach this and how can we expand it?
The pictorial dialogue that started between Chua and Liu has amassed in volume to spark
these questions and the basis of this project is an attempt to address them. By slowing down and stepping back, can we delve deeper and reinterpret the images, see if they hold any other messages when viewed in the absence of the speed in which they were originally produced?
This project illustrates how Chua Chye Teck and Liu Liling perceive and use images in their daily lives as an entry point. From their pictorial dialogue that has been ongoing for a couple of years, there are intriguing images of objects and spaces alongside evocative non-figurative photographs of shifting colour hues and silhouettes. These images respond to one another through aesthetic elements such as composition, subject matter, line and texture, or even through the materiality of technology itself. This spontaneous exchange of visuals has offered new meanings and ways in which to look at photographs.
It is a candid and formal investigation of how the artists view, think of, and expand on their use of the photographic medium in their respective practice and also examines the curatorial role in artist-led projects.
There are 2 parts to this project -
The first part is presented as an interactive piece that mimics 2 mobile phones. Each “phone” contains images arranged in an accordion format, and the audience will be able to engage with the work by flipping the 2 facing “phones” to discover each artist’s images that simulate a conversation forming a diptych. The images chosen as well as their flow are choreographed with intention by the artists.
The second part expands on the idea of a “dialogue” between images and the space it occupies. The exhibition will be held in a two-story industrial unit where both artists will create new images that respond to and reside in the space.
Both parts come together to provide alternative readings of the images that the two artists have taken and shared, so as to reveal the fluidity of meaning in how we communicate in today’s digital world.
Supported by National Arts Council and Arts Fund
Visuals by Currency Design
