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M+, Hong Kong, © Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill 西蒙瑞．吉爾
Forest #1 森林#1
1996–1998
Forest is a set of sixteen large-format gelatin silver prints depicting temporary interventions carried out by Simryn Gill in Port Dickson, Malaysia, and Singapore where she lived for many years. The interventions consisted of grafting pages from books onto trees and plants in the tropical landscape. This black-and-white photograph depicts a tightly wound strand of electrical wires set in opposition to a fan-like spread of vines climbing an exterior wall of the same run-down building. Amid the dense foliage rendered in near-microscopic detail, one can notice the artist’s insertion of strips of texts onto the narrow branches. These texts, embodied as plants and enmeshed in the landscape, are left to age and decay, eventually reverting to the raw fibrous material from which books are made. Selecting excerpts from nineteenth-century English works associated with colonial passage—including Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899)—and choosing military sites such as Fort Canning, Singapore, and Port Dickson, Malaysia, Gill returns these narratives to their roots. Whether read like a page on its own or like a book alongside the other images, the series reflects on the consequences of colonialism through its individual, collective, regional, and international after-effects, which remain deeply embedded in Southeast Asia.
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