We are pleased to be returning to UNSEEN 2019. This year, our booth will present two premieres by an artist and a collective.
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee’s (b.1994, Singapore) works engages with themes of identity, memory and nostalgia. She frequently draws from post-colonial theory and archival material in order to re-frame hegemonic narratives that surround the East. Her latest series, We've Got the Sun Under Our Skin, draw from 20th century British travelogues and ethnographic accounts in Malaya with images created in response to these stories. Shot entirely in Britain, the photographs function as portrayals of the explorers’ experiences in the Straits Settlements—a mimicry to subvert the orientalist gaze.
This ongoing series of photographs is premiering at UNSEEN 2019 & an artist interview is available on UNSEEN Platform.
XING (b.2017, London) exists as a platform to challenge the stereotypes around East and Southeast Asian women. XING champions the vagabonds, challenging hegemony, and celebrates a oneness through image and prose. XING was founded by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee.
The inaugural photobook by XING (2017) explores the current landscape of women in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. It includes essay contributions by Clara Lee on the topic of affective labour invested into creating an image of asian femininity, the impossibility of positing a singular figure of the Asian femme and XING's role itself in collective care work.
The photo series & publication has been featured in Dazed, Riposte, i-D Magazine amongst others. Contributing artists to the first volume of XING include: Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, Lin Zhipeng aka 223, Mayumi Hosokura, Ronan McKenzie, Takuya Nagata, Tammy Volpe and Teresa Eng amongst others.
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Essay below titled ‘Who Is That Girl I See?’ by Clara Lee
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"I would like to begin with what remains unspoken: the unspeakable task of being asked to speak about race and gender as someone who is marked as raced and gendered. Despite how frequently I am demanded to yield my own lived experiences as material for speech, I must admit that I still find it hard to articulate the erasure of those who are caught in this double-bind. While the difficulty of finding an appropriate expression is in large part due to the complexities of the matter — the matter of my body and the matter(ing) of bodies like my own — this clogging up of the windpipe, this choking breathlessness that I suffer is not for the lack of words, but precisely because words fail me. And it is the failure of words to attest to the presence of my being that reduces the materiality of this body into a mouthpiece that lacks any real capacity of address. So instead of permitting myself an audience (audibility but also spectatorship) through the ventriloquising of the image, I want to take a moment to linger in the space of the mirror; to hold this space as a way of tending to and caring for those before us.
To come before is to be in front of, but also prior to, it is to be anterior to sight. Marking a limit that is both imagistic and discursive, sight operates across the imaginary as well as symbolic orders. According to a tradition of psychoanalysis that follows the theory of Jacques Lacan, the imaginary is the realm where one develops the notion of a coherent Self. It subtends the symbolic, a register of signification concerning how the Subject is organised in relation to an external world. By working across the two different orders, sight secures a relation between Self and Other. Here, a crucial distinction is to be made between the Other (with the capital O) and the other (of the small o). In this instance, the Other signifiers a “symbolic interlocutor,” a speaker. Pointed out by Diana Fuss in the Identification Papers, the Other is “constructed as an effect of secondary identification in which the subject shifts its point to another speaking subject”. As such, the Other is distinct from, but inevitably bound up with the other other, the imagined other that is produced as a result of the mirror stage. Commonly referenced in art history as well as film theory, the mirror stage describes the process of subject formation in psychoanalysis whereby an infant recognises itself upon encountering its own image-reflection becomes marked ‘I’.
Recounting the myth of Echo and Narcissus, artist and writer, Jalal Toufic, argues that the process of identification in the mirror stage is simultaneous with a self-interpellation insofar that one is able to “see one’s mirror image [as] facing [oneself]” only as a result of a dual-process. Through the narrative of longing to be seen, Toufic establishes a correspondence between seeing and speaking. As the story goes, the nymph Echo falls in love with a beautiful hunter named Narcissus. However as she is stripped of the ability to speak and can only repeat after the words of others, she struggles to make herself known to him. So when she finally calls out to Narcissus, Toufic explains that is it only because he had (voicelessly) uttered his name while gazing at his own reflection. This leads Toufic to claim that a primary identification opens up to two other possibilities: (1) following Narcissus, a secondary identification, in which ‘I’ becomes an Other; (2) in the case of Echo, where one becomes trapped in the mirror stage, and thus can only gaze endlessly at the back of one’s figure. Transfixed and unable to turn to answer one’s own name, the latter is unable to fully enter a relation of intersubjectivity, in other words, a reciprocal relationship with an/Other.
If Echo is she who is denied speech and at the same time, she who refuses to be called into being, how could the resistance to representation be conceived of differently? What could silence speak to other than the loss of words? Beyond the surface of its reflection, what does the mirror-image conceal? How can the surface be thought of as a coalescing of realities that do not parallel? Apart from our positions as viewer and viewed, what other entanglements do we share? How do we practice looking out for and looking after, as opposed to looking at? What is it like to look into the mirror and not see a face; to protect, cherish and hold closely this faceless figure that is yours, but not entirely your own, which is to say, not yours to own? What I am trying to suggest is that there ways of being otherwise which do not comply with visibility, and instead of searching in the mirror/image for the validation of a presence, we ought to consider, what is it that we expect reflections to show? What sort of image(ries) does the figure of the Asian femme conjure? What reveries does she inspire? What dreams does she harbour?
After all, she is only a fantasy, isn’t she? You tell me."