Sans the Face
Sans the Face
2019 - ongoing
Throughout history, the ability to see as far as the eye desires is deemed a mystical power accorded to divinity. In today’s dominant network culture, digital surveillance has progressively supplanted optical vision. Its pathological omnipresence of decrypting, filtering and pattern recognition, has ensnarled humanity in a complex web of the watcher or the watched, where both co-exist in uneasy complicity. One such device which has permeated daily life is the ubiquitous web camera, a lifeline to connection and intimacy for many during moments of isolation in the recent Covid-19 pandemic, but also a possible encroachment to personal privacy and confidentiality.
Inspired by a post-it sticker slapped over the lens of his laptop’s web camera as a make-shift cover, the artist re-appropriates the stationery as a symbol of playful obliteration, calling to mind the pixilated mosaic obliterating visages of people or gestures deemed inappropriate. Turning the gaze of the web camera onto itself, he invited anonymous strangers encountered spontaneously on the streets to select an oversized post-it of their preferred colour and pose for a portrait with it obscuring their faces.
Defying identification, these individuals transmute into partial blank slates wherein infinite alternative personas proliferate, liberating them momentarily from the milieus they were ensconced within. Through consistent, systemic documentation, a typology of anonymity gradually emerges, akin to a protest against the voluminous surveillance footage gathered to analyse and prescribe human behaviour, without our agency and against our interests. Has the camera, and by extension photography, not only extended the human eye prosthetically but subsumed our capacity for being human? Have we truly come as far as we can see?
~ Text by Kong Yen Lin