Moving Image Award Winner 2022

Portrait of the Jungle People / 山芭佬 (San-Ba-Lou) - Eddie Wong (Malaysia)

Artwork description

“Ever since I was a child attending the Ching Ming Festival, I knew that my grandfather’s portrait on his gravestone was wrong. I later learnt that his tomb was empty. All we knew about him was that he left his family and ‘entered the jungle’ to fight the British. We call him a ‘jungle person’ — Sanba-lou, a Cantonese term used to describe the communist guerrillas. As a member of the Malayan Communist Party, he likely died at the hands of the British colonial forces. And without a photograph, nor records of the man, we may never know whose portrait is on the tombstone."

Portrait of the Jungle People explores both the artist’s family history and the family ‘rhizome’ to honour the offshoots who can neither be traced nor mapped through a series of fragmented narratives and post-memories. The art combines neural networks with language processing models to generate images from text. By combining the predictions of the two models, the artists can use common phrases (prompts) to paint pictures of its underlying concepts, walking through the latent space formed by the training archives’ speculative, fabricated visions.

The work is about how humans and machines make sense of each other, and how this process transitions between co-construction of indigeneity, identity and myth. It emerges from a conflation of machine learning algorithms and postcolonial discourse, presenting the Malaysian-Chinese narrative as fluid and hallucinatory.

Partners and collaborators

Music by Chris Speed Visuals