Softly Amorphous

My works straddle between the simulacrum and the authentic, transforms the mundane into the symbolic, and explores the materiality of photo prints. They comprise a laborious process of information-gathering, material-assembling, and scene-building.

In Softly Amorphous, I explore how the mind navigates through information, while examining the intricacy of material culture. I photograph objects across diverse settings: domestic, urban, and institutional. My subjects include mass-produced items like glassware and kitchen magnets, organic ones like flora and fruits, as well as my hand-crafted ceramics. I’m drawn to how the reflective bottom of a glass cup can resemble a galaxy, how kitchen magnets are tokens of journeys, and how the subdued hue evokes the rising zeitgeist of minimalistic lifestyles.

 Subsequently, I print out the photographs. By cutting, folding, and twisting, I convert the printed paper into three-dimensional forms and photograph the outcome against a white backdrop. These resulting images reference how, in the realms of memory, linearity falls short, objects lose their totality, and different temporal instances entangle. 

I also source images under the themes of technology, science, and culture. They feature intriguing objects and diagrams of theoretical ideas, including an image of an ancient bow headpiece and an illustration of prime knots. I’m interested in how the robust metal was used to emulate the delicacy of a bow, an interplay between the constructed and the original. Meanwhile, the concept of a prime knot, being indecomposable and forever entangled, evokes the cyclical nature of my work: it mirrors the oscillation between photographic representation and reality and the inter-referencing nature of objects as symbolic entities.

By juxtaposing personal photographs with found images in the setting of still-life photography — often characterized by backdrops and countertops — I aim to reflect the rhizomatic pattern of our minds, linking diverse visual lexicons to create meaning.