Physical abstractions.

• Main Author: Yap, Denise Hughes.
• Other Authors: Shannon Lee Castleman
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music::Photography
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49854
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

An oxymoron, Physical Abstractions looks at how race exists in the space of the tangible and the intangible. Race has been immortalised into a truth through racial profiling, stereotypes and language, yet it exists also as an idea that has its roots in fields of study such as sociology, anthropology and Orientalism. A Family Secret draws on the artist’s recent revelation of the circumstances surrounding her mother’s birth. Yellowface / Whitemind looks at how language is used in excluding a person from a racial community. A History of Tinted Shades looks at the problems of representation of the racial “Other” in history and how it continues to exist today.The three pieces look at the parts of the self, the community and the world and how these forces work in a cyclic process that come together as a whole to create identity. Each pentaptych is arranged in a cross as a reference to the historical role of religion in the colonialisation of South East Asia and the incomplete process of decolonialisation in global imagination today. It also serves as a conceptual representation for the intersections of cultures and ideas.