Study title

Vietnam, China, Malaysia

Individual

Family

Family: Household family

Household

Group

The photographer worked independently in Hainan and alongside the project researcher Dr Rie Nakamura in Vietnam and Malaysia, who introduced him to Cham villages and villagers. He also travelled on independently to Cambodia to photograph Cham resident there, though that was outside the scope of the research project. The photographer was thus pursuing an independent artistic project alongside but independently of the research. This was conceived as a means of bridging the gap between the researchers and their research questions, and the project's museum partners, which included art museums. This was successful in that three exhibitions resulted, one in Kuala Lumpur and the others under the aegis of Durham University's Oriental Museum, which was central in brokering the relationship with the other key museum partner, the National Museum of Art in Hanoi, Vietnam, and in delivering training both there and in Kuala Lumpur. Thus, the photographs were created by the photographer as an artistic output. The first two paragraphs of the artist’s statement for his solo exhibition in Durham are cited below:Whilst creating the work, it was very important to me to understand how people lived, where they came from, what they were doing and why, rather than just recording the surface or veneer of an existence. With no formal training in anthropology, the process was one of questioning, observing, learning, with inevitably more questions than answers. I often arrived at the local mosque before prayer-time, hanging around, hopeful that there might be someone who spoke English to create an entry for me. “Muslim?” I was often asked. “No,” I would honestly reply. “I’m here to meet Cham people.” I was never turned away, but invariably was asked to sit, drink tea, engage in sign language, laugh, share in the jokes. Yes, of course you can take photos, no problem. They looked on with delight as I showed them photographs on my Instagram feed of other Cham communities in other countries. “Cham?” they asked, surprised, almost in disbelief. “Yes, Cham!” I replied. We quickly became friends. As an outsider, the warmth I experienced from these people is something that I will never forget. Yet looking back, perhaps this is not so strange, for they too are outsiders. We were more alike than I realised, travellers a long way from home.Beyond telling the stories of some of the people that I encountered, central to these images is the broader theme of representation. In this work, I seek to challenge how ethnic minorities are portrayed photographically, often through a “western - and invariably male - gaze”. In the west we are familiar with a picture-postcard view of ethnic minorities, popularised by publications such as National Geographic. Whilst these images are not pure fabrications, they are inevitably just one facet of a broader, more interesting truth. As such, I was keen to photograph young people, students, entrepreneurs, professors, people wearing their ubiquitous Barcelona football shirts, people glued to their mobile phones, checking what’s happening on their social media feeds. In short, people like ‘me and you’, rather than some exotic ‘other’. For whilst all of the people in these images are united by their ethnicity, they are also united by something larger still.