Lot 31: JASON WEE (b. Singapore 1978)

JASON WEE (b. Singapore 1978)
Captain's Log (Islands of Southeast Asia)
c-type lambda print
25 x 33 1/3 in. (63.5 x 84.5 cm.)
This work is number one from an edition of three

Singapore, Utterly Art Gallery, A View of the Ground, 5 - 15 Oct 2006
Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Art Show 2007, 2 August - 8 October 2007tober 2007
Singapore, NUS Museum, Constructing Landscape: Singapore in Southeast Asia, December 2008 - April 2009

Captain's Log (Islands of Southeast Asia) emerges from Singaporean photographer and visual artist Jason Wee's photography series, Captain's Log. Pieced together on image-rendering software from a number of realistic photographic images of landscapes, the work broaches the line separating reality from fiction. In conjuring the imagery and composition of the present lot entirely out of the breadth and span of his imagination, Wee insists upon the idea of landscape as invention and technology.

If imagination - and by extension the subjective eye - lies at the heart of geographical understanding, what meaning, if any, does geography hold? The artist's inquiry and vivid imagination leading to the careful selection and incorporation of fragments of landscape to form Captain's Log (Islands of Southeast Asia) bears upon us to question the veracity of our knowledge of place and being. In relation to Southeast Asia which first emerged as we understand it today as a political entity around the mid-20th century, such a question is particularly poignant.