The year 1989 is considered a pivotal moment in global history; it marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the birth of the World Wide Web. 

“The time is out of joint.”

Derrida opens Spectres of Marx (1993) with the above line, taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wherein the troubled prince is communing with the ghost of his father. Derrida invokes the ghost of Hamlet’s father to bear the weight of history as it is deconstructed, to preface disjointedness and pluralism.

South Asia is described by many in the art world as being “the next big thing.” With more and more artists and museums popping up, increased attention has been focusing on the rapidly emerging Asian art scene. 

Singaporean-born New York-based photographer John Clang is known for his low-tech style; resisting the temptations of Photoshop, he prefers instead to hand-cut and paste images together.  Working mainly with the idea of accessibility, challenging the barriers between the artist and the audience, his ongoing series “(Re)Contextualizing My Mind,” (1996–?), now on show at Pékin Fine Arts in Hong Kong, brings forth a different side of the artist. The photographs here show poetic translations of Clang’s thoughts, and the images featured are equally abstract. Though he declines to identify them this way, the works feel like a walk through the artist’s visual diary. On the occasion of the exhibition, ArtAsiaPacific spoke with Clang briefly about his work and his passion for archiving.