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M+, Hong Kong, © Simryn Gill
Simryn Gill 西蒙瑞．吉爾
Forest #16 森林#16
1996–1998
Gill’s extreme close-ups of tropical plants position the opposing realms of nature and culture side by side. Amidst the dense vegetation, one can notice a measure of human intervention in the artist’s grafting of pages from printed books onto the living foliage. 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. Choosing authors associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British colonialist expansion, such as Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin, and Daniel Defoe, and military sites such as Fort Canning, Singapore, and Port Dickson, Malaysia, Gill returns these narratives to their roots. In doing so, she asks us to consider not only the histories of place, but also the process of naturalisation whereby something becomes part of a place over time.
In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections. M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong, 22 June–30 September 2018
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