By Lawrence Chin
For the uninitiated, or those unfamiliar with Green Zeng’s body of work, one might catch oneself pausing briefly as one tries to gain orientation in ascertaining the socio-political nexus that runs through these works. Zeng’s presented artworks come across as an attempt to dismantle the distinction between socio-political commentary and documentary approaches in his art-making. Yet one is unsure and perhaps by the lack or even refusal to indulge in overt self-explication of his own work, Zeng is complicit (intentional or otherwise) in encouraging that uncertainty.
One could surmise that it is an uncertainty that is borne out of the specific socio-political milieu of the city-state of Singapore. And one might also further argue that such a cultivation of uncertainty is meant to be a necessary strategy to keep a step ahead out of the clutches of state apparatuses, if at all. Then again, for lack of corroborating evidence, one might just have to accept a more fundamental premise that our acts of representation embedded in how we remember or communicate are intrinsically uncertain (and, hence, unreliable) undertakings. Every so often, we say and recall things or events in ways that belie our desire for an absolute certainty, from the minutiae of daily habits and actions to grandiose and broad-sweeping historical versions. This uncertainty permeates our histories and History.
This lack of certainty need not be construed as a negative trait – instead, coupled to a radical rethinking of aesthetics with historiography, Yap affirms that: “In presenting the opportunity for subjectivation, the historiographical aesthetic may thus be seen as a prognostic of a new stage or the possibility of another start to the historical narrative.” (333) We return to this notion of “subjectivation” later in this brief essay. But suffice to note, this sense of being on the cusp, of already always on the brink of renewal within the familiar or given can be a corrective to a sense of loss or lack that comes from the relentless onslaught of living within a highly controlled society (such as Singapore).
A sense of recognition awaits those who are familiar with the different locales in Singapore that form the setting for the various photographs presented in the series The Exile Revisits The City. Yet this familiarity gives way to a more puzzling awareness that captured within each carefully composed snapshot is a male figure in a generic outfit of short-sleeved shirt and trousers. And the one compositional feature that runs through all the photographs is that the face of the protagonist is neither directly visible nor fully discernible. We are denied the face and hence the identity of the one person in the photographs.
Levinas, who declares that ethics is the first philosophy, posits that an engagement with others begin with an acknowledgement of each other via a face-to-face encounter, or as characterised by Waldenfels in his understanding of the philosophy of Levinas: “we understand that the face is not something seen, observed, registered, deciphered or understood, but rather somebody responded to.” (69) It is the “face” which is the site that establishes an ethical unfolding of an interpersonal and even intrapersonal relationship between and within strangers. In Waldenfels’ analysis of Levinas’ later philosophical writings, the constitution of the “face” becomes more nuanced and increasingly linked to the concept of the “trace”: “As the trace of the other, the face keeps the ambiguous character of an enigma … The enigma, as understood by Levinas, is a borderline phenomenon, located between the visible and the invisible, the said and the saying.” (78)
This indeterminacy or “border phenomena” recalls our earlier uncertain encounter – of recognising what is given yet at the same time not being entirely familiar with it. In the series of photographs, one is able to identify the various locations but not the figure. In a more recent use of these images for the promotional poster for Zeng’s film The Return (2017), the figure was rendered a flat white colour, effectively placing it under erasure. These instances of momentary check or disruption is akin to a Bretchian device of calling into question the comfortably assumed means of presentation. Perhaps, it is this disruption that allows an awareness of a shift in recognising the face from one that is solely determined by human physiology to one which may be psychologically or mentally constituted. If that be the case, then wherein is the “face” of that exile who being rejected and expunged from the body-politic of society refuses a face-to-face encounter? Or, again, what is the (collective) face of the body-politic that must be considered in such an encounter?
In an interview in which Foucault clarifies his working methodology, he expanded on his usage of the term “dispositif” (translated as “apparatus”) to encompass: “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid … The [dispositif] itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.” (The Confession of the Flesh, 174) And if we agree with Foucault’s analysis, then this web of entangled relationships within the body-politic could be a starting point in a face-finding endeavour.
Returning to the series The Exile Revisits The City which was first presented at The Substation in Singapore in 2011, the timing of the presentation of the series of photographs is almost in anticipation of the 10-year anniversary of the passing of the theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun in 2002. It also recalls and pays tribute to the tenacity of Kuo’s own vision and spirit in the founding of The Substation as a contemporary cultural space for open dialogues and exchanges. This despite Kuo being detained in 1974 by the authorities in Singapore for more than 4 years without any recourse to a trial in an open court. The unnamed, unidentified protagonist now almost has a name and a face, fleetingly. Such extraneous details and readings may be considered as overburdening the interpretation of the artwork. And perhaps rightly so but we are doing more than reading – untangling some aspects of that intertwined relations present in that dispositif.
In Zeng’s subsequent work Student Reconstruction (2018), which was first presented as part of his MAFA studies at LASALLE College of the Arts, the theme of (televised) confession becomes the subject of the video work. The dispositif extends to include not just that pertaining to the events referenced by the work – namely, political detentions and the occasional televised confession in an interview format of these detainees in Singapore during the 1970s – but also that of the reworking and representation of those events – of the educational system, independent learning and historical awareness, or lack of.
Paying close attention to the contents of the video work, one can begin to discern a degree of unease as the respective roles are played out. This unease takes on an additional dimension as a reflection of the emotions that actual detainees would likely have felt many times more in terms of intensity. It is also an unease that undergirds the viewer’s probable experience of disquiet in seeing how a fellow human being is subjected to a line of questioning which is calculative, at best, and verging on inflicting humiliation, at worst. This unease or emotional discomfort is clearly enmeshed in and through the work.
A shift from an emotional distress to a psychological one happens in the video work at about the 9:22 mark – when the scene was faded through a black screen to return to what at first glance appears to be the same studio interview setup. However, the interviewee has been swapped. This creates a dissonance that persists for some time until our uncertainty dissolves and we are sure that it is indeed another person with a different demeanour. This in turn opens up an apprehension of a manifold of possible persons that can take the place of the confessor – both actual and potential. The shift from the singular to a multitude implicates the viewer, both as a passive witness and as well as a plausible participant. It is a substitution of one-for-the-many and leads to a realisation that the face of the body-politic was and is (already) dispersed within – it is also we / I that is the confessor.
Yap opines that the historiographical artwork mobilises a communitarian identity through “the dynamics of situation” (324), further “producing a contingency for subjectivation, that also, finally, returns its purpose as ultimately historical. This is art as method.” (325, emphasis original) It is perhaps a method of learning to accept and live with less than rigid boundaries and more fluid credence. It is perhaps also a method of recognising the space and face of an ethical approach to dissent and differences; of remembering so as not to repeat unwittingly; but also more importantly, of understanding so as to grow collectively.
In a short review of Jean Daniel’s book The Era of Raptures, Foucault concludes by way of an abdominishment: “Never consent to be completely comfortable with your own certainties.” (For an Ethics of Discomfort, 127) In the brief review published in 1979, Foucault explores and explicates the different strands of political development and subsequent dissipation of left-wing politics in the context of France. And yet holding out for a betterment of the larger body-politic and of coming face-to-face within this body-politic in an ethical manner, Foucault’s advice of foregoing an easy comfort in certainties cannot be anything else but an affirmation, even as it is one of refusal.
References
Foucault, Michel. “The Confession of the Flesh”. Power / Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972 – 1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, Kate Soper. Pantheon Books. 1980. pp.194-228.
Foucault, Michel. “For an Ethics of Discomfort”. Translated by Lisa Hochroth. The Politics of Truth. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e). 2007. pp.121-7.
Waldenfels, Bernard. “Levinas and the face of the other”. The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. Edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge University Press. 2004. pp.63-81.
Yap, June. Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia. Strategic Information and Research Development Centre. 2016
Lawrence Chin is a practicing paintings conservator with a long-standing interest in cultural studies and contemporary art practices. His occasional writings are primed by a smattering of haphazard reading of texts from the realms of existentialist philosophy, postcolonial theory and poststructuralist writings, amongst others.
Essay written on the occasion of the exhibition ” Returning, Revisiting & Reconstructing” at Foundation Cinema Oasis. Exhibition Dates: 4 May – 2 June 2019.
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