The Mountain Was There
The Mountain Was There is a quiet search for a landscape that exists somewhere between memory and desire—a place I long to return to, yet one that does not exist in reality or on any map. This imagined terrain is shaped from original pictorial sources, drawn from real landscapes I experienced in August 2024, in Yunnan, China. It asks: how does one feel a sense of belonging to a place remote from one’s life? How can meaning be made from places that exist only in memory and feeling?
Through experimental darkroom techniques, collage, and alternative processes such as coffee developing, I build images that offer varying depths of looking into a place. These photo-paintings blend tactile textures with subtle tones, forming landscapes that reflect longing, introspection, and the quiet pull of the unknown.
This work expands photography beyond its traditional role as a recorder of reality. Guided by philosophical ideas of interpretation and material process, The Mountain Was There embraces photography as a medium of transformation, where the image becomes both a memory and a question. In these constructed landscapes, distant mountains fade softly into the sky, visible only for a moment through the frame of a window, seen from far, far away.
Through experimental darkroom techniques, collage, and alternative processes such as coffee developing, I build images that offer varying depths of looking into a place. These photo-paintings blend tactile textures with subtle tones, forming landscapes that reflect longing, introspection, and the quiet pull of the unknown.
This work expands photography beyond its traditional role as a recorder of reality. Guided by philosophical ideas of interpretation and material process, The Mountain Was There embraces photography as a medium of transformation, where the image becomes both a memory and a question. In these constructed landscapes, distant mountains fade softly into the sky, visible only for a moment through the frame of a window, seen from far, far away.
Exhibition Views from This Place of Ours, NTU ADM Graduation Showcase, New Bahru, 2025