The Regency Made Me Blind
2018, National Gallery of Singapore.
With Jeremy Chu 7,110 overlapping individual B&W A4 Laser prints on variously tinted 80 gsm photocopy A4 sheets applied to the wall, surface area 323 square-meters. Type C unique state print applied to IKEA GILBERT CHAIR, Digital print on heliotropic blind. An OUTBOUND commission by The National Gallery, Singapore
Printed on an office copier in the curatorial department of the National Gallery Singapore and installed by Jeremey Chu, who, also contributed a series of Tibetan Buddhist mantras and a community “garden” featuring paper cutouts of various plants made by participants in workshops conducted by Jeremy concluding with them “planting” their flowers within gardenesque The Regency Made Me Blind image substrate by aligning the various cut outs with the underlying image and affixing them with wallpaper glue.
The concept for the work is derived by overlaying Joannem Blaeu’s 1663 large-scale 6 sheet wall map Archipelagus Orientalis, sive Asiaticus at a one-to-one scale onto the walls of the staircase atrium between levels 4 and 5 of the City Hall Wing of the National Gallery Singapore. This rare map, one of the great treasures of the National Library of Australia, collates the major landmasses of archipelagic and peninsular Southeast Asia and Australia as they were understood by Western navigators and cartographers in the mid 17th century, linking them in a visual continuum for the first time.
In The Regency Made Me Blind, in the place of Blaeu’s outlines of the various geographical salients is a gardenscape aggregated from images taken in the Botanical Gardens established in the 19th century by the different European Colonising powers in Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore. These separate images were then composited, treated and printed on a selection of tinted photocopy papers and applied to the wall in vertical bands based on an 1819 Regency wallpaper. A colour was assigned to each nation state based on their population. The Regency Made Me Blind is intended to be experienced as both an accurate botanical and demographic of a substantial section of Southeast Asia.
The Regency Made Me Blind is centered on the Botanical Gardens of Singapore where a chair covered with a laminated Type C print is provided for visitors to sit and reflect. Camouflaged this chair spatialises a section of the image halfway up the staircase. Around this Renjie Teoh has confected a pavilion that to many suggests a pareidolia in which the face of Ganesha is visible – where the God’s eyes are evoked by the silhouettes of twin Art-Deco pendant lamps (that Teoh had observed in grand hall of the Supreme Court wing), and his trunk by the horizontal seat of the chair.
The Regency Made Me Blind view from bottom of the stairs. Black & White Photocopy (laser print) on 80 gsm, tinted A4 paper and digital print on translucent heliotropic blind (Back lit film). The blind comes down at 7am and go up at 7pm daily.
The Regency Made Me Blind view from upper (level 5) balcony. Black & White Photocopy (laser print) on 80 gsm, tinted A4 paper and digital print on translucent heliotropic blind (Back lit film).
The Regency Made Me Blind spandrel wall detail (level 5). Black & White Photocopy (laser print) on 80 gsm, tinted A4 paper overlaid with hand cut Black & White photocopy on cadmium yellow tinted paper of Tibetan Buddhist text (Jeremy Chu)
The Regency Made Me Blind spandrel wall detail (level 5). Black & White Photocopy (laser print) on 80 gsm, tinted A4 paper overlaid with hand cut Black & White photocopy on cadmium yellow tinted paper of Tibetan Buddhist text (Jeremy Chu)
The Regency Made Me Blind - Pareidolia/Reflective Grove. Hand cut photocopy overlay with IKEA GILBERT chair with Laminated Type “C” photographic print applied to the seat and back. (Gary Carsley & Renjie Teoh)
The Regency Made Me Blind - Pareidolia/Reflective Grove. Hand cut photocopy overlay with IKEA GILBERT chair with Laminated Type “C” photographic print applied to the seat and back. (Gary Carsley)
The Regency Made Me Blind Study for stair section between levels 4 and 5
The Regency Made Me Blind - Pareidolia/Reflective Grove. Detail of Pavilion. Hand cut photocopy overlay in variously tinted 100 gsm papers.
The Regency Made Me Blind - Pareidolia/Reflective Grove. Detail of Pavilion. Hand cut photocopy overlay in variously tinted 100 gsm papers.
The Regency Made Me Blind (Detail) Hand cut statue of “Spring” printed on the 120 gsm, natural white, onion skin office stationery of the National Gallery. Spring is one of the four seasons that line the staircase connecting upper and lower sections of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Sydney. One of a suite of 19th century Italian marble statues purchased from the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition.
Bye Bye
Prior to its removal Gary Carsley, Jeremy Chu and Renjie Teoh using orange scented water removed selected sections of the site-specific commission "The Regency Made Me Blind".
Their interest was an exploration of the possibilities of loss and erasure as positive, meaning making gestures. We were also motivated to further extend our exploration of the non-normative artefact and the idea that some marginalised communities, particularly those whose existence was newly legalised, might want acknowledgement and recognition but wished to keep some things invisible in plain site.
Using the grid and the elemental unit of A4 paper, we applied the arcane language of dots and dashes that enables the legibility of morse code to the installation A4 grid in which a dot is one A4 and a dash is three A4’s. The space between letters that are part of the same word is one A4’. The space between words is three A4’s. We used this simple mode of transcription to encrypt and embed a message saying BYE BYE.
We are motived by an interest in how communities might wish to keep some aspect of their distinctive identity undisclosed, opaque and resistive of appropriation by the gaze of the dominant other.