Being Together: Tye Family (Paris, Tanglin)

Inspired by his own personal experience, John Clang’s, Being Together, 2012, is a series of portraits of Singaporean families, separated by oceans and continents, utilizing Skype technology and projectors. Live recordings of family members via Skype were projected onto living spaces, allowing distanced relatives to come together for an informal family portrait.

The series documents and examines the diasporic condition, the experience of migration and separation, as families living in different cities and time zones, grapple with the realities of living apart from each other.  The series expands Clang’s fascination with expressions of time and space and how we negotiate our human existences within these two dimensions. In collapsing time zones into a two-dimensional frame, the series offers the illusion of how physical bodies separated by time and space can briefly co-exist in the realm of pixels and light.