The Indigenous Photography in Taiwan can be traced back to the late 19 century when Tori Ryuzo had applied photography to his ‘subjects’ with box camera in his trip to the “savage land”. Meanwhile, the images of indigenous people in popular culture have, more or less, represented the “photographs of aborigines as colonial archives” by Chen Wei-chi’s “Photography as Ethnographic Method: The Anthropological Photographic Archives in Japanese Colonial Taiwan” in 2017. If, from present to historic, the question of ethnic categorization and the origin of tribes and communities, and the research inclination to comparative ethnology in peripheral island indigenous people still prevail, is it inevitable that the methodology based on the differences of physical features lead to the discrimination and orthering? And how can photographer escapes from the lures of such practices? In Meeting NML #32 (Nusantara Archive #11), Malaysian practitioner of box camera Jeffrey Lim will share his working methods and projects with us. He will also ‘map’ a possible genealogy of ‘Archipelago’ indigenous photography for the audience.

Jeffrey Lim comes from a background in communication design whose work explores a form of photography, urban surveying, and social & cultural mapping projects. His interests are located at the intersection of identity and cultural heritage, taking forms of conceptual representation with the use of imagery, found-objects, spaces and interactions. Several of his projects explore community building and spaces. His works include: Bicycle Map Project (2014), a crowd-sourced cycling map for Kuala Lumpur; Project ISD (2016) Improving Streets of Downtown Kuala Lumpur, an urbanist report, survey with recommendations; Attachment (2017) performative installation with Japan Foundation; and Kanta Protraits (2012-ongoing), a series of photographic studies of portraitures.

No Man’s Land Residency & Nusantara Archive project (The 1st Year): www.facebook.com/NusantaraArchive/

Organizer: No Man’s Land; Digital Art Foundation
Associate Organizer: ET@T, Open-Contemporary Art Center
Observation Team: Fiona Cheng, Wu Ting-Kuen, Posak Jodian, Alice Ko (supported by National Culture and Arts Foundation)