“Taking a speculative turn while considering the continuity of family narratives, Sim grafts the image of her young child and her disappeared grandfather into these found magic lantern slide images. While they could never meet in real life, the lineage and connection between Sim’s child and grandfather is enacted in this highly constructed–if not already fabulist–visual space of colonial projection.
…
An artist discovers traumas of her family story, traumas which are also collectively held. Now as a parent, she considers how one might parcel out such a family story to their child, how the child is implicated in this learning. The process mirrors the transgenerational processes of forgetting and remembering, to which photography is a prosthetic body, a mnemonic support. How do we choose to confront shared historical trauma, narrate atrocity, and come into a fuller accounting of the effects of transnational political oppression? Under-histories, counter-narratives, the previously silenced narratives must be heard and seen. And, as Sim’s poetic craftwork offers, the assimilation of past horrors also begs for the courage of imagination.”
– Cora Fisher
“The colonial photographic archive—the subject of Sim’s series—is rife with similar kinds of mistakes, super-impositions, and mis-registrations, where projected and real meanings fail to align. Comprising forty photographic glass plates displayed in wood stands, Sim’s manipulated images seek to uncover the slippages between the fantasies of the colonial state, the grounded reality of anti-colonial resistance, and the ongoing return of the imperial past in the present in the form of trans-generational inheritance.
….
By enlarging found photographs depicting the British colony of Malaya from the late 1800s and early 1900s and slyly inserting images of her grandfather—a figure who was absented from her family history after he was extradited by the British to China, and killed by Chinese Nationalist Party soldiers in 1949—and of her young son into the scenes, Sim creates a “reconstructed
archive of an imaginary Southeast Asian landscape” that refuses to forget her familial ancestry.”
— Gabrielle Moser
Photos by South Ho.
