Ng Wu Gang

How do we look at images today and how do we perceive meaning? Usually, photographs are prized for what you see in the positive but Ng Wu Gang is an artist that’s interested in the negative.

One of Wu Gang’s favourite tools is the polaroid – a fast disappearing format. There is only one company in the world left producing it and in limited formats and quantities. The type Wu Gang uses is called Peel Apart Film or Fuji FP100C / FP3000B, of which production has ceased entirely. So with every take, Wu Gang is aware of his diminishing supply. As such, working with expired stock is common practice.

A polaroid’s mechanism illustrates the immediacy of image-making, especially the Peel Apart Films, which simultaneously create a negative and a positive image. But Wu Gang isn’t as interested in the content of the photograph but how it can be manipulated and distorted: giving birth to a new aesthetic that focuses on the polaroid as object. Being as interested in the photographic negative as much as the positive, Wu Gang often chooses to portray the vernacular in a light that effaces specificity and renders the photographs with a sense of enigmatic ‘nowhereness’.

When one thinks about photo manipulation, one often thinks of digital manipulation tools but Wu Gang experiments with temperatures, bleaching, cutting, boiling, ageing and peeling—a physical alteration of the polaroid. The result is often unpredictable and two outcomes are never the same. Over time, Ng naturally finds himself playing the role of an archivist, creating an epistemological study of images: a ‘taxonomy’ of photographs. He finds that over time the subjects in his photographs have taken on new veneers, like the yellowing hues of the photographic chemicals.

With today’s media landscape of image saturation, fake news and a suspicion of all digital images, how much do we believe in ‘the image’, especially an image we can hold in our hands? What value will these images have in the future, and will they matter?