Portraiture/Portrait photography

“As Singapore became established as a British colony, its inhabitants began to negotiate questions of identity and their engagement with the British authorities and European inhabitants. This process of negotiating the colonial can be seen through genres such as portraiture and photography in the early 20th century, which reveal how different ways of representing people began to de­velop in the Straits Settlements, in relation to pictorial traditions from Europe or China.
“On one hand, works such as the Portrait of John Crawfurd, British Resident of Singapore (1823–1826) demonstrate the image of self as a representa­tion of power and social status. On the other hand, the drawings of John Turnbull Thomson such as Joseph Pahang and Arabs of Mixed Race still echo the ethnographic impulse to record encounters with local inhabitants. These European perspectives of representing themselves and others also appeared in the medium of photography from the late 19th century to the early 20th century.” (Melinda Susanto, “Tropical Tapestry,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 34)

“Commercial photography studios in late 19th-cen­tury and early 20th-century Singapore often produced photographs representing local inhabitants of differ­ent ethnicities, which established tropes of identity. Photographs illustrating different professions such as barbers or hawkers were also popular, revealing how local people were perceived and modelled as a projec­tion of their identities. While these photographs were at times commissioned by individuals, they were also mass-produced to meet market demands.” (Melinda Susanto, “Tropical Tapestry,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 35)

“European perspectives of representing self and others in portraiture and photography, however, are further complicated when situated alongside other forms of image-making practices in this region. Straits Chinese communities already had an established tra­dition of producing ancestral portraits. For instance, the ancestral portraits of Mr and Mrs Chee Kiat Bong from Malacca were created for commemorative purposes and facilitated customary rituals of honouring ancestors. As the 20th century progressed, prominent Straits Chinese personalities were amongst the earliest to adopt the medium of oil to represent themselves, such as Luo Yi Hu’s Portrait of Tan Kim Seng. The range of image-making practices among the Straits Chinese communities in Malacca, Penang and Singapore sug­gests a common engagement with portraiture within the region.” (Melinda Susanto, “Tropical Tapestry,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 35)

“In addition, the Social Realist artists challenged the boundaries of self-portraiture. […] The artist’s insertion of his like­ness emphasises the agency of the individual as a critical witness to and actor in the country’s history. […] Regardless of his intention, the artist’s insertion of his ‘self’ into the event makes him a participant of it, whether real or imagined. These am­biguities in the work demonstrate how the primacy of the individual remains important in the production of multiple subjectivities that play a role in the construction of national narratives while remaining critical of it, thus opening up possibility for different interpretations.” (Seng Yu Jun & Cai Heng, “The Real Against the New: Social Realism and Abstraction,” Siapa Nama Kamu? Art in Singapore Since the 19th Century, 59)