“One Day We’ll Understand”
2015 – on-going
Remnants
Photographic installation, variable dimensions
Requiem
Two-channel video and sound installation, 16:9, sound, colour
Duration: 12:34 mins
Sim Chi Yin’s Remnants and Requiem take us on a cinematic journey through traces of hidden histories. The ethereal landscapes she conjures are an unspoken archive of an undeclared war. Evocative of the unknown or unknowable, these sites hold fragments of the twelve-year conflict between the British colonial government and the resistance led by the Malayan leftists (from 1948 to 1960).
Remnants: Photographic installation, variable dimensions
Having just lost India in 1947 and Burma in 1948, and fighting to restore its moral authority in the region post-World War Two, Britain battled in the dense tropical jungles across the Malay Peninsula to keep its prized colony of Malaya — strategically important but also a key source of rubber and tin globally at the time. This was the longest conflict Britain fought in the post-war era, but officially it was called an “emergency.” The army of the Communist Party of Malaya had fought alongside Britain during the war against the Japanese but then turned to ousting the British. As the Cold War took hold near and far, what most leftists saw primarily as an anti-colonial fight was cast internationally as a Communist insurgency. Tens of thousands were labelled “bandits” and “Communist terrorists” by the state. Along with sympathisers, they were detained without trial, jailed or deported.
Sim’s paternal grandfather Shen Huansheng was among the more than 30,000 deported. He was a Chinese school principal and editor of a leftist newspaper in Perak state, northern Malaya. British Special Branch officers took Shen away in handcuffs from the family shop in mid-1948, an act witnessed by his two eldest sons — the last time they saw their father. Deported in early 1949 to Shantou (Swatow) in southern China, Shen then joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) guerrilla army unit in his ancestral village in the final months of the Chinese Civil War. Bad luck seemed to follow Shen as much as his politics did. Three months before the Communists declared victory in China, he was arrested and executed by soldiers of the Nationalist Kuomintang army who were retreating in defeat through those mountains, towards Taiwan. The mother, wife and five children left behind in Malaya did not hear about his death for another two years. For the next 60 years, he was never again spoken of in the family.
“One Day We’ll Understand”: solo exhibition at Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong — Exhibition guide
Just as this trauma has sat quietly within Sim’s family, it is also deeply embodied in society, along with many other ghosts from this war. These are the starting points in the artist’s on-going, years-long research and artistic project “One Day We’ll Understand” which takes its title from an inscription on a grave of a British planter killed by the Communist guerrillas during the war. Less certain than that affirmative line, Sim asks through her work if we will, in our politically polarised times, after all, one day be able to understand. More broadly, she questions if the consequences and legacies of colonialism have been reckoned with and reflected upon, and if global politics today is still (mis)informed by unfinished, unexamined dreams of empire.
Sim has been driven to study the circumstances people like her grandfather found themselves in, their ideas, ideals and the choices they made at that time when the geopolitical intersected with the personal and familial, sometimes with tragic results. She followed her grandfather’s deportation trail, returning to their ancestral village and house in the mountains of Meixian, Guangdong, where she found an obelisk built to commemorate Shen for his martyrdom for the Communist cause — while he had been written out of his own family history. A relative handed her a tattered photograph from Malaya, dated 1949. It was her grandfather’s British prison photograph bearing his detainee number and his Hakka name transliterated into English — likely the last photograph of him.
As the Malayan Emergency became articulated as a textbook example of a successful counter-insurgency campaign by the British who then granted independence to Malaysia in 1957 (and self-government to Singapore in 1959), the stories of the left were muted and disciplined, inconvenient histories that stand counter to the state’s truth regime and foundational national narratives.
“One Day We’ll Understand”: Installation Views
Sim has sought out some of the unrecorded stories, songs, memories, artefacts and documents of the leftist foot soldiers, creating an assemblage that is an unofficial, alternate archive of that war. In Remnants, she shows unembellished photographs of 32 of the objects she has made still-life studies of from her visits with the old left across southern China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and southern Thailand.
“One Day We’ll Understand”: In conversation with professor Tejaswini Niranjana at Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong.
These are juxtaposed with the intentionally aestheticised landscape photographs she made around sites where this war played out, where battles or ambushes took place, the jungles where the guerrillas had their bases, limestone caves where they hid, rivers “awash” with civilians killed by the Communists, a village where British troops killed 24 unarmed civilians in December 1948, a giant man-made lake created by a dam to flood the Communists out of the rainforest, and “New Villages” — barb-wired camps where the British authorities resettled more than half a million squatters to cut the supply of men, arms, food and medicines to the Communists. While grounded in historical and archival research, Sim’s aesthetic approach in making this landscape work evokes a sense of spatial haunting and the absent presences in sites of memories known and unknown. It is as if she projects onto the jungle, rubber trees, tin mines, limestone caves which were recurring motifs in the war, conjuring traces of the time. Her aesthetic choices here echo her work on nuclear landscapes in the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize commission, Most People Were Silent, slipping from the documentary into a different sort of imaginary, transcending the quotidian to prompt us to suspend our sense of place, reality, time, belief and, perhaps, moral judgment.
“One Day We’ll Understand”: Reviews
In another sort of palimpsest, Requiem, a two-channel video and sound installation depicts a number of now very elderly Malayan leftists reclaiming memories of political participation, war, deportation, exile and Socialist dreams, in the form of song — in their own voice. In particularly poignant moments, they struggle to remember some lines of their anthem from 70 years ago, the Internationale, which their death row comrades also sang as they were about to be hanged, and Goodbye Malaya, which they once belted out en masse and defiantly, on the decks of the ship as they were being deported from their home land — and in many cases, country of birth. Like memory itself, their voices are sometimes fragile, fallible, but also resilient.
“One Day We’ll Understand”: Performative reading at Magnum Foundation “Counter Histories” symposium
Sim Chi Yin presented “One Day We’ll Understand” at the Magnum Foundation “Counter Histories” symposium at the New School in New York, 1 May 2018.
