Jason Wee 2
Details
Jason Wee 2
Metadata (MODS) |
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|---|---|
| Titles | Jason Wee 2: Clip 2 |
| Name | Jason Wee |
| Name | Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Type of Resource | sound recording-nonmusical |
| Genre | Interview |
| Identifier | Interview |
| Identifier | Jason Wee Clip 2 |
| Abstract | Jason Wee discusses his work with islands and reclaimed sand in Singapore. He discusses the early maps of Singapore and his use of photo-rendering software to produce fictional photographs of Singapore. |
| Extent | 6:14 |
| Form | sound recording |
| Note | Joanne Leow: Obviously some of your work has focused on islands, and then there are sort of archetypal thinking behind islands, like is it a paradise, is it a desert, are there—as you put it—shadow islands beneath islands, which is really fascinating. You’re saying that you have many islands, and yet obviously we come from a place that is very singular in many ways. This exceptional red dot. I mean, how do you see your practice and your work, thinking through that kind of dominant idea of what this island is? [0:31] Jason Wee: Originally, it started with thinking that space isn’t simply the kind of vessel in which we enter into and in which other things happen, that the space itself is produced and it’s the result of a long—I suspect—a long generative process. Then I get intrigued about what those generations—how many generations could I identify, and where do I begin to look? And so initially a lot of the work that I did right out of grad school and in the first few years in New York was mostly looking at the cartographical depictions of Singapore and of Southeast Asia; what did the anticipation of Southeast Asia produce? So even before there was visual contact, what did they expect to see, as they draw it out. Even when they pass through the straits then, there is still this large southern continent that is partly ice, partly land but they have no idea and eventually they realize…and eventually it became Australia, and so those are the materials that I began with. And that’s also partly in connection to plays by Pao Kun, actually, that I look both in the west and I tried to identify the maps that Zhenglte used on his journeys to Mauritius and to see how those maps were drawn up. And what’s interesting to me about those maps was that they were not drawn spatially, they had—they don’t give dimensions in space, so they give dimensions in time; they tell you how long it takes to get from one landmark to another. And so Singapore the island was only identified by the landmark, so I started from maps and then also began thinking that if an idea of Singapore occurs before there was visual contact, that means there was also an idea of Singapore even before…it allows me to get under the idea of the founding of Singapore / Singapore having been found. So, the idea that Singapore exists already imaginatively as a kind of paradise or utopia then began a series of work where I rendered those maps using these kinds of photo rendering programs that people use to create backdrops for science fiction film. Say when John Carter flies, is supposed to fly all the way to Mars, but we can’t really fly to Mars, so someone renders that planet. So, I used those softwares to render the islands of Southeast Asia as they expect to see them, and then presented them as photographs, as real spaces. And that kind of illusion of the real landscape, the uncanny or the unreal, then produces a moment in the gallery of skepticism and doubt, not so much about the image as much as it is about how we are seen and why did they expect to even see what they want to see. [3:30] Joanne Leow: Yeah, and you disrupt the ways of seeing, then, in some senses. There’s other means of thinking that you can disrupt, right? Jason Wee: Yeah. Joanne Leow: Suddenly you recognize other fictions that have been told to you about particular islands, which is really fascinating. One other thing that really struck me when you were describing it is this idea of this use of technology, this use of rendering. What do you think is the relation between your use of this technology in order to produce something that is in that gap between the real and fictional? Sometimes I think the large amounts of aggregate sand, other things that we’re using to produce something is also akin to the sort of fantastical utopian. [4:10] Jason Wee: The thing for me also was, while I produce this kind of unreal space, that it didn’t, in some ways, function as a fiction. The utopian and paradisiacal spaces are sometimes a version of the real rather than a space that someone immediately identifies as false, and then dismiss as pure fantasy. So, in fact what happens a lot when they look at the image is that they go, “why haven’t I been there, why haven’t I seen this, where did you shoot this from?” It’s really that kind of, like, “how did you get to? Why is it so pristine?” and so on, before slowly it comes back to them and go “oh, maybe this is…” So it’s that moment that’s very interesting, because when that moment begins where they start to question themselves, then it starts this conversation about how much of the way we build space and the way we live in them actually depends on utopian thinking, that utopian thinking isn’t so much about creating / identifying only far-off ideals, but sometimes it’s often used to just simply identify the next step of which you produce the iteration of urban development. [5:21] Joanne Leow: Precisely, and I think we just elide it, we’re not even thinking that it could possibly be utopian thinking or fictionalization, you just think, “oh that’s just reality, it’s just going to be reality.” [5:33] Jason Wee: Yeah. And what I really find really fascinating about Singapore right now is that they seem to fully, fully embrace it. I mean I don’t know if May told you, because I spoke to her a little bit about it, asking if she’s interested in seeing it, but she did go to the Future Cities Lab, and that’s located within a university environment, but there’s, within the ministry, a center for futurist thinking that’s really just completely anticipatory, predictive, and boldly, nakedly, utopian, like they just… [6:07] Joanne Leow: Well, and think about the dystopian literature that’s coming out in tandem— Jason Wee: (laughing) Yes! Yeah! Joanne Leow: —with the utopian thinking as a kind of reaction to it, right. |
| Access Condition | Contact Dr. Joanne Leow |
| Subject Geographic | Pacific Ocean |
| Subject Hierarchical Geographic | Asia--Singapore------Singapore |
| Subject Local Name | ----Photography--Landscape / Skyline--Islands--Pacific Ocean-- |