What Does It Mean To Be Asian?

What does it mean to be asian? That question is so large, so vast, that answering it is nearly impossible. The truth is that Singaporeans today straddle multiple cultural identities: our own ethnic heritage, our place in the world as global citizens and our communal sense of a nation. So instead of trying to find an unattainable answer, we went in search of the particular. Image-making has the power of influencing how we view, imagine and define ourselves. Through their work and research, the three Singapore image-makers we spoke to here each deal with specific perspectives of asian-ness. All start unsurprisingly from some place (or something) personal then delve into bigger, more mercurial ideas: the dominance of eurocentric beauty ideals; the challenge of conceiving and creating a postcolonial identity; the fragility of heritage and history in a modern world. And in doing so, each offers a different viewpoint on what it means and looks like to be asian. Gordon NG goes in for a close-up.

- Gordon NG

ELIZABETH GABRIELLE LEE

“I’m interested in the notion of slow violence,” says Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee. The term, which was originally used to describe violence on the climate, has been borrowed by the 26-year-old to apply to postcolonialism and how it influences the spaces we live in. Space is an especially important part of this equation – Lee, a Singaporean, lives and works in London.

Her most recent and ongoing work, We’ve Got The Sun Under Our Skin, is a photographic series that inverts the colonial gaze. It’s based on colonial literature about Malaya from the 1800s by British ethnologists and anthropologists who were recording the region’s people, flora and fauna. “The language is alarming. Landscapes, women and people were fetishised,” Lee says of the texts she found.

She proceeded to tear pages from these source texts, scrawled out portions of it – leaving in relevant passages – then set to work lensing these subjects in her own way. “In a primal sense, it felt like I was trying to reclaim these landscapes and people,” she says.