An interview with poet, writer and photographer Jason Wee in New York

Jason Wee's work is best characterized by his history. He came to art after sojourns in theatre, poetry, queer activism and political theory. He keenly interested in the political amidst the visual field. He is currently exploring the landscape as technology, theatre as nonsites and the poetic in art.

He works primarily in photographic installations and digital photography. He is the editor for Softblow and guest editor of the2ndRule. Previously he was the editor of Vehicle and a theatre reviewer with The Straits Times.

He is educated at the National University of Singapore (BA with honors), and The New School (MFA Photo). He is a studio fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

This year he will be showing at the Chelsea Art Museum and Peer Gallery in New York, Utterly Art Gallery in Singapore, and 1st Singapore Biennale.




RJ says:
Hello Jason

Jason says:
Hey

RJ says:
How are you?

Jason says:
Good, cold. brr. and you?

RJ says:
Good.

RJ says:
Congratulations on your entry into the Singapore biennale.

RJ says:
Tell us a little about your proposed project if you don’t mind.

Jason says:
I have yet to confirm the details of the installation. I'm creating a sound and photo installation around the year 1987, which is the year of Operation Spectrum, and the year that my great-grandmother died. She was 76. I was 9. They detained over 20 people under the ISA, falsely accusing them of being Marxists. They were never tried. At least one made a forced confession and was recorded. A number of them were Catholic social workers and poverty activists.

Jason says:
I have gathered some material, but there is still so much more to go, really.

RJ says:
I remember having seen a previous installation of yours at Alliance France. It had some powerful poetry and images. Are you going along those lines?

Jason says:
Right now I am in New York, which makes the research a little harder, but I hope to be back again soon, in June.

Jason says:
Certain things do continue on - I think I will always be passionate about poetry - but this time there is no verse involved. Mainly stories, spoken word, soundscapes, portraits..

Jason says:
Hopefully it will still be poetic, but I'll leave that to the viewer, and the critic in me.

RJ says:
Ahh wonderful...

Jason says:
Also, I think it will look quite different because the biennale spaces aren't your conventional white cubes. Not that the space at the Alliance France necessarily is one of those, but it is certainly closer to that than a Hindu temple, or an abandoned military camp, or City Hall.

Jason says:
These architectural frames come with histories that will affect your approach to the work, in a way that is harder to ignore than within the white cube.

Jason says:
In a way, history entropied to null in a white cube, so in many ways you can escape from it if you wish. Less so in lived, inhabited spaces.

Jason says:
That is one thing, I think, a white cube gallery isn't, though art requires it, a habitus.

Jason says:
There is an artist here I've been chatting to regularly about this question, actually. She comes by my studio to look at my work and tell me what's wrong with it, and sometimes there is plenty! Andrea Fraser, whose practice turns on this question of art's habitation, draws primarily from the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, and she has a new book out, called Museum Highlights.

RJ says:
How does your work, your piece, your aspirations to engage your audience entangle the theme of the biennale.. Belief..?

Jason says:
That, in a way, I left to the curators to find the appropriate symmetries within their thematics and my work. But I have been looking at ‘belief’, well, for a long time, first within the inheritance of familial faiths (had both a devout Christian and a devout Buddhist for grandparents), and later working on Levinas and Derrida's later works on cosmopolitanism and ethics.

Jason says:
I do take a point that the philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes, that it is impossible to reason away belief, or even more to eliminate it completely from it. In a way, we think of belief as a supplement to reason, that impossible trace that refuses complete negation, and follows and trails our constructions of rational systems and structures as that ephemeral ghost haunting the house we build, or that memory that flashes up in an instant and is gone.

RJ says:
Yes yes..who is this Slavoj Zizek? His work sounds like a beautiful poem..one that one could keep reading..

Jason says:
Oh, Slavoj Zizek writes for the London Review of Books, and his latest book The Parallax View, which according to him, 'attempts to rehabilitate dialectical materialism', will be out later this month

Jason says:
William Connolly, this political theorist living in Baltimore, has a recent, unusual book, written with a different perspective, from neuroscience, that in this way, we perhaps have to begin thinking about thinking differently.

Jason says:
Later on, he begins to describe what he has called the affective register in language, which is perhaps just an auratic illusion, or perhaps a necessary and contrapuntal correlative to our reasonable, regular modes of speaking and writing.

Jason says:
The affective register as the affects on you the speaker and listener outside of, and a little beyond, what is actually being said, written, or meant.

Jason says:
It could be an illusion, or just the aura of things past, of things singular, original and whole, or nostalgic,

Jason says:
or it could be existential, or a complex mode of psychic investment,

Jason says:
or some of the above *and* an externality, a contrapuntal note to our everyday melody.

Jason says:
I mean, you can see it as a way of explaining, why are some convictions so strongly held?

Jason says:
Such as evangelical conversion stories, or

Jason says:
scriptural or literal authority,

Jason says:
or notions of ethnic purity?

RJ says:
William Connolly's 'belief' is a notion you subscribe to?

Jason says:
Right now, the argument for an affective register, is politically convincing, for me, in looking at diversity and pluralism

Jason says:
and is useful in pointing out the flaws in sophisticated but flawed commentaries by public intellectuals who, on the fly, are pushing surprisingly regressive agendas. For example, Thio Li Ann has once argued that our politics is in some danger of a Western-derived secularism that threatens our democracy with the exclusion of particular points of view, and she had in mind religious ones.

Jason says:
But there is a subterfuge going on, in invoking once again, the regressive spectre of 'Western influence'. For one, the affective register is registered in our constitution as multiculturalism, multi-religiosity, and for another, the contest and vocalisation of belief is ongoing and vigorous, as the shifting numbers of new religion adherents at the latest census attest to

Jason says:
and as she, a fervent evangelical, should know as proselytization efforts go.

Jason says:
Besides, even if we for a moment accept her premise, isn't the aggressive social postures of the Singapore evangelical movement clearly influenced by the ugly fisticuffs of recent american politics around 'religious values'?

RJ says:
Jason, that was brilliant and I thank you. I am going to take a while to fully digest it..haha..but tell me., what is 'your' art Jason? Photography, poetry, painting? Where lies your heart?

Jason says:
my art?

RJ says:
Yes

Jason says:
hmm, I hold on to something I read by a guy called Deleuze, who basically said that our jobs is to constantly make unique our expressions, to find new words, new arguments, new modes of thinking that will befit the important, life-structuring moments of our lives.

RJ says:
Wonderful wonderful..

Jason says:
I think I am preoccupied by thinking through ideas. The expressions accompany it, for sure, but I seldom start with, let's make a photograph about x.

Jason says:
It’s more about where some whim of a thought led me.

RJ says:
Tell me a little about New York and your life there. Is it such a haven for artists as it is made out to be. Perhaps haven is not the word but...perhaps 'muse' is a better word..) What do you say?

Jason says:
One big difference, I think, is the culture of viewership that exists here where art viewership and participation is amenable with other ways of participating in public culture and social life.

Jason says:
I mean, it presents its own sets of tensions, the way perhaps some recent art has become coaxial to entertainment as a means of distraction.

Jason says:
But there is a culture of viewerships here used to looking at, reading about, and arguing for art, and it is incredibly enriching to be in the middle of it, because the conversations and dialogues are not just happening 'out there' among various publics, but also between artists, critics, writers, historians, curators, and so on.

Jason says:
For me, there is the initial flush of participating in the romance that is New York. But I have gotten the most out of this sojourn from the conversations with my peers, in the studio program I'm in, at art openings, at philosophy lectures, and so on. Receiving regular, stimulating intellectual engagement and challenges provokes my practice to collapse, break down, change, mutate, progress, reform, and I think I am the better artist for it.

RJ says:
One final question.. What influence do you think 'street art' is exerting on the scape of visual arts today? How does it matter if at all? How will paintings and art appreciation change?

Jason says:
This may be pat and par to say, but 'street art' is locally derived and locally produced, and often cannot be applied across contexts without distorting what's going on 'on the streets'. I mean, the way graffiti artists like Barry McGee is accepted into American galleries is an indication that the street value of graffiti has diminished, where it could very well be rising somewhere else.

Jason says:
Also, we have to be careful to distinguish 'street art' as a left-of-the-law, public art form often made in anonymity with other consumerist forms trading under that name.

Jason says:
For example, sometimes we can separate the former from other design arts, such as web and graphic design, which often trade in the same mythology, typology and graphology.

Jason says:
Like in Singapore, for example, we see Heman Chong start out as a graphic design, and the influence is still palpable. But we wouldn't call him a street artist; that will be misunderstanding his art. 'as a graphic designer'.

Jason says:
And sometimes we can't separate as cleanly, such as early Ryan McGuinness.

Jason says:
Speaking in terms of Singapore, I think the interesting collective to watch is Phunk Studio. I met Jackson, one member of the group, in New York, and they are constantly looking to cross platforms. I did a show with them in Singapore at the disused St James Power Station and they've done shows in galleries in New York.

RJ says:
I love and respect their work. They had this great piece at Zoukout last year that blew me away. I least expected to find it there and it smacked of your earlier comment of art that has become coaxial to entertainment as a means of distraction.

Jason says:
Yeah, and the point of interest will be seeing the cube challenged in Singapore, but the thing is, when the art space is already so challenged in Singapore, then I think the real question is really what is the space of art left in Singapore?

RJ says:
But I must stop taking anymore of your time Jason.

RJ says:
Thanks a bunch for agreeing to have this chat with me. It has been trully instructive.

Jason says:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Jason says:
This is important work, documenting the scene as it is, and letting artists just ramble on.