How We Learn(t)

This two-person exhibition was the 2021 Winners Showcase for the Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Photography, an annual award to recognise photographic excellence among students at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art, Design and Media. It ran from 21 May to 5 June 2022 at Gillman Barracks in Singapore, and featured the works of Hong Shu-ying and Syahrul Anuar.

How We Learn(t) brings together two new bodies of work that examine, deconstruct, and re-present existing systems of knowledge.

Informed by her eighteen years as a member of various Chinese orchestras, Hong Shu-ying reflects on the culture of ensembleship in 「 濡 睦 」 resonations. Exploring hand-copied scores, pre-concert tuning, and orchestral seating arrangements, her works illuminate the shared languages and collective experiences that live on the periphery, yet serve as the scaffolding for communal music-making.

In substance of a minute, recorded by a machine and a few others, Syahrul Anuar takes the tools, techniques, and visual vocabulary of cartography into his own hands, removing them from positions of authority and perceived objectivity. Through four exercises in which mapmaking is unlearned and relearned, he challenges the seemingly immutable frameworks that govern the way we move through urban Singapore.

Recipients of the Kwek Leng Joo Prize of Excellence in Photography 2021, the two artists sidestep conventional photography in this exhibition. In its place are sculptures, moving images, and prints resembling drawings, all of which deliberately skirt the bodies of knowledge at the heart of their subjects.

Still, the ‘documentative’—one of the core functions of photography—remains insistently present in both series. It has been reimagined as gestures that are abstract, speculative, intimate, and reflexive; gestures that dislocate something from its source, in order to transform our understanding.

View the exhibition catalogue here. Design by gideon-jamie.

Photos by Hong Shu-ying and Syahrul Anuar.