The past recollected: One Day We’ll Understand

Sim Chi Yin’s One Day We’ll Understand is framed by a conflict that took place in Malaya between 1948 and 1960, called the Malayan Emergency by the British colonial powers, and the Anti-British National Liberation War by guerilla fighters who saw it as an anti-colonial war. Since 2015, she has examined and engaged with the historiographies of this period with photographs, video and sound installations, oral histories, and a practice-based PhD. A personal connection initially drew her to this era: her paternal grandfather, a newspaper editor, was separated from his family in 1949 and extradited to China by the British Special Branch as part of large-scale deportation and detention measures taken against persons suspected of being Communists during that time. There, he met his death at the hands of Chinese Nationalist Party soldiers, a tragedy that was for many years a secret in her family. This led her to seek out, interview and photograph former guerillas and exiles from her grandfather’s generation currently living in China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, while also making photographs of landscapes and objects that were significant to this twelve-year conflict. This resulted in the series Remnants, and the video installation Requiem. Her latest body of work, Interventions, represents a new direction in this project. It debuted in a solo exhibition I curated at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France that took place from 4 July to 26 September 2021. It was also shown in an exhibition curated by Lotte Laub that took place from 14 September to 27 November that same year at Zilberman Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Working with the Malaya-related holdings of the Imperial War Museum’s archives, Sim placed prints and negatives on a lightbox and photographed them, a process that allowed her to simultaneously capture the verso and recto of each archival image in-camera. Her photographic transformations make transparent the mechanisms of meaning behind these artefacts, and reveal multiple layers of taxonomy in the colonial archive.