YING ANG PHOTO BLOG

www.yingangphoto.com

[yingangphoto]

Sketches for an upcoming solo of The Quickening

[yingangphoto]

We’re violent and in love

Nostalgic and hog-tied to the present

Singing platitudes and gripping

Our hearts like the slippery

Raw things that they are

The days are long and hot

We plunge in the sea

In a rhythm of sweat and sluice

[yingangphoto]

So proud to announce that my artist book, The Quickening, designed by @teunvdh, was given second prize for the Australian Photo Book Award last month at the closing of @photofestivalau!! The Quickening is now completely sold out, so copies are now only available through the resale market. Excerpt from the book can be viewed here. Please email or DM to see the full video, otherwise the book can also be viewed at the following libraries: V&A Museum, London International Center of Photography, New York National Library, Canberra Photography Studies College, Melbourne

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“The Quickening is ambitious, subtle, inventive and deeply moving. I can hardly remember the last time I encountered a work that made such wise use of tactility in achieving a photographic vision. So many good decisions.” - Teju Cole The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of new motherhood and the postpartum period. Riso and offset printed, this uniquely handmade book was published in a limited first edition of 250 copies, redolent of the number of days of gestation before the premature birth of the author’s son. Additionally, 30 copies from a special edition each come with a choice of one of two prints. This number is indicative of the number of days left until the child’s due date. Created as an editioned art book, each copy is signed and numbered. A variety of papers were used to reflect a haptic complexity in addition to a soft french fold that feels full and fleshy in the hands. A chaotic and varying bind with red string is a nod to the stitches used during the emergency caesarean birth of the child and no book is precisely the same. Finalist for the Vevey Images Grand Prix for 2019 Julia Margaret Cameron Award Honorable Mention for 2019 Solo exhibition at Rencontres d'Arles 2019 Winner of the BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize 2020 Finalist for the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Prize 2020 Tokyo International Foto Award Honorable Mention for 2020 Official Selection for the London International Creative Competition 2020 Finalist for the Perimeter x PHOTO 2021 International Photobook Prize Winner of Belfast Photo Festival 2021 Bronze medal for the Documentary Book Prize at the Moscow International Foto Awards 2021 Px3 Paris Photo Award Honorable Mention for 2021 Australian Photobook Award Honorable Mention for 2022 Finalist for the 2022 SIPF Photobook Award SEE THE PROJECT ~~~ 90 pages with 116 images French fold Combination of offset and riso print Various uncoated papers Softcover with linen sleeve 8.6 x 11 inches First Edition of 280 + 20 AP   Self Published Photos & text © 2021 Ying Ang Design Heijdens Karwei, Amsterdam ISBN: 978-0-646-83323-1 Printed in the Netherlands ~~~ Critical Reviews: "The Quickening wears its handmade-ness on its sleeve. A ream of loose papers held together with a complex patterned variation on a Japanese stitch tells the reader that this is a personal and intimate document… The cacophony of imagery we are presented with oscillates between the manic, the incredibly dark, the gentle, the dreamlike and the intimate… Ang’s book is an exploration of photobook making, and how narrative works in the visual book form—it pushes and stretches concepts of storytelling, of showing and revealing. And finally, it’s a moment of total honesty and openness told in the only way it could have possibly been told." - Daniel Boetker-Smith for Lensculture "Work like Ang’s has such profound value for articulating hard-to-reach experiences that language often fails to capture. She entangles the viewer in the web of social and political issues surrounding the transition into motherhood that are too often ignored and overlooked... The psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote, “only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life” – a sentiment that manifests in Ang’s book over and over again" - Gem Fletcher for Creative Review "Ang’s images are carefully composed and meticulously photographed, showing a mastery and deft use of photographic technique. She uses a wide range of tonality, lighting, contrast, and printing methods to produce different textures and moods, as well as many unexpected transitions from page to page. Many images burst at the seams with symbolism and layers of meaning, resulting in work that rewards repeat viewing and contemplation." - Andy Pham for Paper Journal "The pictures in The Quickening are a gorgeous cacophony of tender and tension-filled scenes interwoven with moments of luminosity which show how easily the lightest moments of motherhood can slip into the difficult ones (and back again). There’s a softness to the pictures, too – a dreaminess that feels like the first moments of waking up, where everything is a little blurry and sleep images linger." - Joanna Cresswell for Refinery29 "Ang’s depiction of matrescence is layered and complex. Her images blend the gentle and soft, with a strain and rawness that becomes all-consuming. Velvety skin is enveloped in warm, delicate light. But, motifs of that tenderness behind misted glass at once suggest fullness and a claustrophobic repetition. The narrative is textured and sensual; it mirrors the intensity of Ang’s lived experience." - Izabela Radwanska Zhang for the British Journal of Photography

[yingangphoto]

I want you to know me without my body. My body betrays me. My eyes look ahead too confidently, my mouth skirts topics too personal. My hands are nonchalant in gesture and bluff their way through measured chin rubbing and a thoughtful clasp at my lips. My breasts are large and my hair is black streaked with gray. I present as a woman approaching middle age, but know that the truth of it is, I am simply a half-formed thing made up entirely of a honeycomb of desire and hurt.

[yingangphoto]

The Quickening: A memoir on matrescence

Very excited to announce that my second major book has been shortlisted for the 2020 Lucie Foundation Prototype Book Prize!! 

[yingangphoto]

“The woman who thinks she can choose femininity, can toy with it like the social drinker toys with wine - well she’s asking for it, asking to be undone, devoured, asking to spend her life perpetrating a new fraud, manufacturing a new identity, only this time it’s her equality that’s fake. Either she’s doing twice as much as she did before, or she sacrifices her equality and does less than she should. She’s two women, or she’s half a woman. And either way she’ll have to say, because she chose it, that she’s enjoying herself.”

- Rachel Cusk, “Aftermath”

[yingangphoto]

On the cusp of turning 3.

This morning I looked into your eyes and felt seen. You are beginning to know me as I find myself again. As you grow, I return. It comes like a revelation. You love me and I, you.

Your babyhood is gone. Lost to time and my patchy memory. Long lonely nights glossed over, hours strapped to a whirring pump and roiling resentment. What remains is the soft roundness left in your cheeks, the dimples in your fists.

[yingangphoto]

“ My mother cried for forty days and forty nights. As long as I have known her, I have known her to cry. I used to think that I would grow up to be a different sort of woman, that I would not cry, and that I would solve the problem of her crying. She could never tell me what was wrong except to say, I’m tired. Could it be that she was always tired? I wondered, when I was little, Doesn’t she know she’s unhappy? I thought the worst thing in the world would be to be unhappy, but not to know it. As I grew older, I compulsively checked myself for signs that I was unhappy. Then I grew unhappy, too. I grew filled up with tears.

All through my childhood, I felt I had done something wrong. I searched my every gesture, my words, the way I sat upon a chair. What was I doing to make her cry? A child thinks she is the cause of even the stars in the sky, so of course my mother’s crying was all about me. Why had I been born to cause her pain? Since I had caused it, I wanted to take it away. But I was too little. I didn’t even know how to spell my own name. Knowing so little, how could I have understood a single thing about her suffering? I still don’t understand. No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy. I have been busy writing. My mother often says, You are free. Perhaps I am. I can do what I like. So I will stop her from crying. Once I am finished writing this book, neither one of us will ever cry again.”

- Excerpt from Sheila Heti’s “Motherhood”

[yingangphoto]

I need him as much as he needs me. That midday feed. A few hours away at work and I start craving him proximally. He latches, eyes half mast, both prone. Both recharging on the sensation of skin and milky breath. Five minutes these days is all he needs.

[yingangphoto]

Driving home in a state of seeing and unseeing. I jolt alert and swerve away from the wheels of a truck churning next to me. I imagine not swerving. The front of my car clipping the truck on the highway. Screeching metal, plume of smoke, my body a twisted licorice stick of car seat leather and axel. I imagine my son forgetting me after a while.

[yingangphoto]

She comes in waves, cresting, breaking. Not the translucent kind, but the black water kind. She wants to enter you everywhere. She fills your nose, pushing to get to your lungs, gagging you up, burning your throat with a bitter salt. Your eyes blink frantically open and shut, seeing nothing.

[yingangphoto]

More than when I was a teenager and my body betrayed my difference to the boys I was friends with, more than when my mother told me that the reason she paid for my university education was so that I could marry an educated man, more than the time I was overpowered and violated by a friend, more than the hum of fear and danger on the road when I traveled alone, more than the countless times in the world of photojournalism when I was reminded that I was a visitor at the fraternity. More, so much more. I had never felt so beholden, trapped, isolated, sacred, resentful, needed, stereotyped, shamed, enraged and objectified in my womanhood as I did when I had a baby. 

A lifetime wedged between

Each moonrise.

We wake, feed, laugh,

Cry, sleep, shower,

Cook, clean, repeat.

The outside world passes,

A streak of cirrus cloud.

Ice particles in the wind.

[yingangphoto]

”The greatest internal challenge I faced was simply that I’d read and thought so little about motherhood before having children. I wasn’t interested in it. Nothing about motherhood as a subject seemed important or sexy or engaging or exciting, maybe because I’m most interested in writing about the world and its workings, and motherhood in our culture still pulls women out of the world, out of public life. I’m reading Jaqueline Rose’s essay, Mothers, right now, and she suggests this segregation happens because “the radical care and visceral mess of child-rearing must neither degrade nor stain the upstanding citizen. The shameful debris of the human body, familiar to any mother, must not enter the domain of public life and spill onto the streets.”

 - Kim Brooks

[yingangphoto]

Photographs from the last summer of my youth.

[yingangphoto]

There is a breed of bird called the Bower Bird. It searches for objects that are a particular shade of blue with which to built its home. Bic pen, bottle cap blue. Broken toy part blue. The culmination of this search is to create the perfect bower to attract the perfect mate. The Bower Bird is a romantic. It lines its home in cobalt and hopes for its mate to come along and recognize that echoing blue as a sign, that yes, I am the one you sing for, forage for.

[yingangphoto]

When I used to move through space.

[yingangphoto]

In the morning

I wake from the scent of

bitter melon and molasses.

Your hawk nose

buried in the shelter

of my clavicle.