Sour Sun (2021) Published by Heavy Books
96 pages
22 x 28cm
Edition of 300
Balacron Hardcover
ISBN: 978-82-93580-14-0
Graphic Design by Sillas Funch
Edited by Minh Ngoc Nguyen and Christian Tunge
Published / also available through ︎︎︎Heavy Books︎︎︎
Additional words on Paper Journal
Sour Sun operates as a vocabulary for my recent work and offers a perspective of my photographic tricks and tinkering. Through the guise and semantics of commercial photography and contemporary still life, the book looks to examine Southeast-Asian shapes of consumerism, taste and fetishization through the optics of a second-generation migrant.
By utilising exaggerated scales, inverted colors, and photographic tropes, along with my interest in Post-Internet and Southeast Asian visual cultures, the images aim to re-constitute and dissect familiar objects. The images attempt to maintain a lax dichotomy: the presence of superfluous and natural objects, accompanied by reckless artificial lightning, ultimately creating a personal reappropriation of the objects and symbols.
These interventions are often created through the manipulation of still life arrangements - acting as agents, to subvert codified expectations of how the images are constructed and understood. By restructuring the controlled parameters into a space of level playing field and imagination, Sour Sun also points to the ways in which images and visual media inscribe ideas of nationality and the desire for individual concession within photography.