Dances on Their Own marks Wee’s return to the strategies of abstraction in landscape images, as well as the category of ‘the photographic’. Each of these images can be thought of as composites of every other image in the set and comprises both extreme close-ups and landscape views. The artist follows queer bodies through an unspecified location in Singapore, as these individuals cross and re-cross the area looking for each other.
As critic Douglas Crimp writes, sex is “everywhere for us, and everything we wanted to venture,” the driving compulsion and the ambition for the evening. The mode of abstraction in this body of works produces a visual move that covers the possibilities of this ‘everywhere’, moving from the immediacy at the image surface to the landscape at the far horizon, while echoing the secrecy of their actions.
Abstraction in this body of work approaches those strategies of survival and self-presentation utilized by some queer folk in Singapore. From this point of view, the works participate in a wider consideration of the socio-political forces that have catalyze tactics of concealment and camouflage against unwanted surveillance and shame. Pieces of the puzzle jumbled, only decipherable by the ‘initiated’, and only fully understood as a whole.”
