Jungle People
Portrait of the Jungle People / 山芭佬(San-Ba-Lou) 2022
Single channel video
Duration: 15 min
The making of Portrait of the Jungle People was made possible through a production grant by ILHAM Gallery as part of its inaugural ILHAM Art Show, a triennial exhibition platform initiated to give artists in Malaysia the opportunity to experiment and make new work. The ILHAM Art Show 2022 is currently showing at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur (ilhamgallery.com) until 23 October 2022
Essay: http://www.ilhamgallery.com/data/uploads/2022/artshow/ilham-artshow-2022_writings_1122july.pdf
“Since I was a child attending the Ching Ming Festival (ancestral tomb cleaning ritual), I knew that my grandfather’s portrait on his gravestone was wrong. I later learned that his tomb was empty. All we knew about him was that he left his family and ‘entered the jungle’ to fight the British. We call him a ‘jungle person’ — San- ba-lou, a Cantonese term used to describe the communist guerrillas. As a member of the Malayan Communist Party, he likely died at the hands of the British colonial forces. And without a photograph, nor records of the man, we may never know whose portrait is on the tombstone.”
Portrait of the Jungle People explores the artist’s family history and the family ‘rhizome’ to honour the offshoots which can neither be traced nor mapped through a series of fragmented narratives and post-memories. The art combines neural networks with language processing models to generate images from text. By combining the predictions of the two models, the artists can use common phrases (prompts) to paint pictures of their underlying concepts, walking through the latent space formed by the training archives’ speculative, fabricated visions.
The work is about how humans and machines make sense of each other, and how this process transitions between the co-construction of indigeneity, identity and myth. It emerges from a conflation of machine learning algorithms and postcolonial discourse, presenting the Malaysian-Chinese narrative as fluid and hallucinatory.