Nowadays, we are constantly bombarded by the photographed image, scattered everywhere in the urban landscape, seducing us with their auratic quality while at the same time attempting to sell something, while in cyberspace, the digital image mutate, grow, change via digital tools or disintegrate via sharing and usage. Furthermore, the act of taking a photograph has become an innate gesture to most people equipped with smartphones and mobile digital devices. These photos captured anywhere using a mobile device could mean something for a moment either as a way to document vital information or freeze meaningful moments, but usually in time end up as hopeless digital relics forgotten in the phone’s memory. This group exhibition at Richard Koh Fine Art titled Only a Fragment presents three award-winning artists working in Malaysia that use photography as an important part of their visual language while expanding its utility as more than documenters of reality. The works on show offer varied conceptual strategies, with some that use text to expand the reading of the images while others eliminate superfluous details, showing the images as they are, devoid of distracting allusions.
This e-book is published to accompany a group exhibition titled Only a Fragment by Eiffel Chong, Minstrel Kuik and Sherman Ong running at Richard Koh Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur from 7 to 21 May 2015.
