“One Day We’ll Understand” at Framer Framed Gallery, Amsterdam

A piece of my on-going history project “One Day We’ll Understand” is in a group show in Amsterdam 15 September to 18 November, at Framer Framed gallery. “Unauthorised Medium”, curated by Annie Kwan.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/events/event/sim-chi-yin-unauthorised-medium/

https://framerframed.nl/en/exposities/expositie-unauthorised-medium/

I’m showing an experimental installation of portraits, still life images and text from my “One Day We’ll Understand” project. Installation view by Eva Broekema.

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Sim Chi Yin, b.1978, Singapore

One Day We’ll Understand (2018). Photographic installation, archival pigment ink on paper, variable dimensions

In Sim Chi Yin’s family, the  story  of her  paternal grandfather  had  always  been  unspoken.  One  of  tens  of  thousands leftists  deported  to  China  by  the  British during  the  anti-colonial  insurgency in  Malaya  — known  as  the  Malayan Emergency  (1948  –60)— her grandfather  was  eventually executed  by the  anti-Communist  Kuomintang  soldiers  in  1949,  shortly before  their  surrender  to  the  Communists  in  the  Chinese  Civil  War. In One Day  We’ll  Understand, the artist takes her family  history  as a  point  of  departure,  and explores  a  largely  hidden chapter  of  the  Cold  War  in  Southeast, in the areas known today as Malaysia  and  Singapore.

Through research and collecting oral histories, Sim Chi Yin has for the last six years been working on bringing her grandfather’s story, as well as that  of  his generation  of  anti-colonial  activists, to the fore. The artist has created  archives  for  a  number  of  them,  now  spread  out  over  multiple territories  —  China,  Malaysia, Thailand,  Hong  Kong,  Singapore. These  stories,  not  yet  recorded  in  any official  archive,  are counter-narratives  to  the  available  histories  of  this  period  so far constructed from  British  archives. While these narratives complicate and provide more nuance to this turbulent period, the artist also confronts further philosophical questions with regards to archives and collective histories: Whose past  is  it?  Whose  archives and who accesses them? Whose fragile  memories?  What is truth?

 

Ou Qingfang, aka Zhou Tong, (b.1930, Perak) was a guard to Chin Peng, the MCP leader, when the Emergency broke in mid 1948. He later rose to a regional role himself, fighting in the jungles of southern Thailand from 1952 till 1989. He returned to Malaysia in 1992, after the peace treaty.

 

Zhang Yuzhu (b. 1931, Thailand) joined the Malayan Communist guerilla army in 1967 in southern Thailand. In the 1970s (she does not remember the exact year), she was on patrol duty when she came under fire. Her right arm was shattered by a bullet. Her platoon leader sawed it off above the elbow “with one cut”, she recalls.

 

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