Loke Hong Seng, born 1943, Singapore, is a fine art photographer who specialised in shooting street portraits of Singapore during the period from 1963 to 1985.
The text below is Gael's catalogue essay for the 2015 exhibition hosted by YEO Workshop
With ‘The Asian Century’ upon us economically and politically, it is not surprising that 21st century curators and collectors locally and internationally, have spectacularly embraced and to an extent colonised, contemporary Asian photomedia artists.
Mid -20th century postwar photojournalists working sporadically in Asia from Henri Cartier-Bresson to the Vietnam reportage of Larry Burrows, maintain the aura of sober documentary photography and are venerated but also reviewed for new 21st century meanings.
It strikes me that the idea that there could be a sequential History of the Asian photographer yet to be imagined. When that day comes, the 20th century modern Asian photographers will emerge as a significant and revealing tradition. But first we have to rediscover them from the most sentimental camera club Pictorialists to the dedicated independent post WWII documentary photographers such as Loke Hong Seng and the many as yet not universally known Asian photojournalists.
Loke Hong Seng’s body of work over the two decades of his most prolific work from 1963-85 tracks the overlaying of the corporatised Singapore Republic out of the old kampong and colonial entrepot. Loke’s aesthetic similarly moves between the old and the new. He shares the Pictorialist photographic society photographer’s delight in the moody scene, the quirky byways of urban life with the social investigation of street photography as vigorously practised by post WWII photojournalists.
His final overlay is the decentred vision of the younger generation of edgy ‘personal documentary’ school photographers of the 60s and 70s.
Loke‘s framing of an old Chinese man in a doorway adjacent to a scratch of graffiti for example, has the humility of Cartier-Bresson’s environmental worker portraits. Indeed many of Loke’s industrial images are touched by Cartier-Bresson and the modern photo essay format.
The reward of Loke’s body of work is how he explores and extends what is already known as a ‘good picture’. For instance in images of the workers in bum boats, a woman selling chickens or a row of shop houses or the series of a group of workers, Loke gently opens a question for the viewer.
Framed through blurred legs at ground level that serve to isolate her, the woman chicken makes us wonder what she is thinking about, so suddenly she is a person we can relate to.
We see a row of shop houses that have a modern housing development looming over them them, a bold pattern of cargo nets in a foreground seem ready to smash a row of shops. It is an old dilemma, the old makes way for the new but who benefits? We see a food cart being pushed with great effort by young and old workers.
Will they get to live in the new apartments opposite, drive the new cars or marry the chic girls crossing street? Everywhere old and new lives connect and cross.
Loke uses many devices familiar to the street photographers of the 1970s using new reflex cameras and lenses that allowed for close- up foreground figures and deep backgrounds. Loke alternates between Hasselblad and Leica R so his images alternate between the considered large format camera and the spontaneously captured image.
We see images glimpsed through layers, and people in all directions without the single static, hierarchic compositions of older Pictorialism and photojournalism. Chaos gently reigns expressing the tumultuous years of destruction and creation.
Do not be mistaken these are subtle pictures. There is always another note that changes the initial perception of the scene and counters the clichéd view. Sometimes this experience comes from seeing more shots of the same scene.
The touristy image becomes complicated by the sequential images of the same subject, as for example in a series showing a work gang and their overseers in some protracted discussion over lorries full of basket loads of rocks. The series steps beyond the glib image. A child washes clothes in the river, next shot she looks up and smiles at the photographer.
A connection is made In another series of on an art class view of seemingly simple shot of a young Chinese woman posing with quite dignity by a tree for another young woman artist, watched on by an older woman. Elsewhere two girls are drawing thatched huts. Who are these ‘new women’ are they architects of the new order? Who told them women could have a life of their own and be artists?
Loke Hong Seng learned of course from the multitude of Chinese photographers profiled in Chinese photo magazines especially those out of Hong Kong and studied the winning entries in the international competitions in which he was also a winner at times.
Some of the names we can follow through the Internet such as Chen Fuli and Chin San Long renowned for their use of montage to create landscapes in the spirit of the Chinese scroll painting or San Francisco based Fan Ho who has moved recently to surreal images made from montaging his earlier negatives. Fantasy however, has not been Loke’s path.
After 1985 the new Singapore seemed to have overridden the old, and Loke’s drive to engage with the city’s story fell away. A favourite image for the writer is of the young girls representing different racial communities in Singapore in uniform carrying banner for a parade. Loke leaves the field to their endeavours in the new age.
These young people will hopefully be tempted soon, by exhibitions such as this, to savour the intricate beauties of Loke’s work as it becomes better known and appreciated.
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