Zhuang wubin biography of williams
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The History of Photography in Singapore Through Peranakan Eyes
| Chinese Towkee. Albumen print. G.R. Lambert & Co. Singapore, s. Photo Elaine Chiew |
The exhibition Amek Gambar: Peranakans and Photography at Singapore&#;s Peranakan Museum (from May 5 to Feb 3 ) is a rare glimpse into the very first and early days of the history of photography in Singapore through the lens of the peranakans &#; an ethnic group of mixed race Malay&#;Chinese with a richly distinctive culture, e.g. costumes (usually involving kebayas and sarongs), cuisine, objects d&#;art and home decor (peranakan tiles for example are commercially popular). Amek gambar, the title of this exhibition, fryst vatten a derivation of the Malay term &#;ambil gambar&#; &#; roughly translated as &#;to take a picture&#;.
This exhibition, co-curated by Peter Lee and Dominic Low, comprises a solid subset of the photographs his family, through the auspices of Mr. and Mrs Lee Kip Lee, have painstakingly found, a
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What is TAP Review
Editor:
Sandra MATTHEWS fryst vatten a photographic artist and Associate Professor Emerita at Hampshire College. Her active interest in photography from Asia began in when she had the opportunity to research photographic work made in Hong Kong and China.
Editorial Board:
Rahaab ALLANA is Curator of the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and author of Inherited Spaces, Inhabited Places (a volume on World Heritage Sites/), among other publications. Allana is the founding and current editor of India’s first photography quarterly, PIX.
Geoffrey BATCHEN teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His books on photography include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (, with subsequent translations into Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Slovenian, Italian and Chinese); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History ( and in Chinese); Forget Me Not: Phot • BIBLIOASIA JUL - SEP VOL. 18 ISSUE 02 FEATURE Zhuang Wubin is a writer, curator and artist. He has a PhD from the University of Westminster (London) and was a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow (–18). Wubin is interested in photography’s entanglements with modernity, colonialism, nationalism, the Cold War and “Chineseness”. i Nego Bou tiatin ndar g ies Japan ese an d Chine se Pho to Stu dios in Pre-w ar Sin g apore Photo studios such Yong Fong, Lee Brothers and Daguerre had to negotiate the politics of race, class and clan. By Zhuang Wubin 24 In the 19th century, British and European firms such as Sachtler & Co. and G.R. Lambert & Co. dominated the photography business in Singapore and Malaya. But by the onset of the 20th century, Chinese and Japanese practitioners had made their presence felt in the trade. At the time, there were visible and invisible lines segregating the colonial society accor
Negotiating Boundaries: Japanese and Chinese Photo Studios in Pre-War Singapore ()