Sharon Chin, “Portal” (installation view), commissioned for Asian Art Biennial 2024. Image courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. Read more
Sharon Chin, “Portal” (installation view), commissioned for Asian Art Biennial 2024. Image courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. Read more
Sharon Chin, “Portal” (installation view), commissioned for Asian Art Biennial 2024. Image courtesy of National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Photograph by Grace Wong Read more
Portal
Site-specific installation with oil lamps and wheatpasted poster images, commissioned for Asian Art Biennial 2024. Co-produced by Zedeck Siew, with photography by Grace Wong. Curated by Haeju Kim.
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“Portal” is about a pair of mangrove trees that grew side-by-side on my favorite beach in Port Dickson, Malaysia. Standing like gateposts on the rocky shore, the two trees symbolized my deepening relationship to that small patch of eroded beach. Originally conceived as celebration of life, the project turned into an elegy when, halfway through production, the trees were felled by a strong storm.
The work consists of a series of photographs staged on the beach at night and in the daytime. For nighttime, discarded alcohol bottles from the beach were made into oil lamps, and arranged around the circles of broken roots where the trees used to grow. We lit them at low tide, on the night of the Hunter’s Moon in October 2024. Two soft rings of firelight hugged the foreground, against the electric glow of tanker ships offloading their crude at the oil platform a short distance from shore.
For the daytime images, I wheatpasted enlarged photographs of the two trees to the walls of the backshore. These photos were taken over the course of the last fours years – from my first visits to the beach in 2020, to the night I discovered the uprooted trees, lying not far from where they had stood. The final photos were images of these pasted images.
“Portal” was presented as a photo installation at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, featuring a selection of these nighttime and daytime images, pasted directly to the gallery walls. The same oil lamps, painted with mangrove roots, then filled with beach rocks and clear fuel, were arranged in two circles on the floor.
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“Portal” also included a participatory social ceremony, performed during the opening of Asian Art Biennial 2024. In March 2025, the performance returned to be staged again on the beach in Port Dickson.
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More about “Portal”:
Do we get to stay, too?: Interview with co-producer Zedeck Siew
Matching the light: Interview with photographer Grace Wong
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The 2024 Asian Art Biennial, titled “How to Hold Your Breath,” took place from 16 November 2024, to 2 March 2025, in Taichung, Taiwan, at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA). The exhibition was curated by a team including Fang Yen Hsiang, Anne Davidian, Merv Espina, Haeju Kim, and Asli Seven.
