back issue

Selina Ou's photographs embody the difference between seeing and looking. They examine how we perceive and are perceived. By representing people in different cultures, Ou presents the social forces which shape our sense of self.
 
Art & Australia is delighted to announce Selina Ou as the fifth artist in the ANZ Private Bank Emerging Artists Program. Ou's most recent series, created in Japan during an Australia Council residency in Tokyo, locates her fascination with identity within the dynamics of Japanese culture.
 
What strikes me most about Ou's photographs is their stillness, frontality and precise compositional structure. For example, Ou's 2001 series 'Serving You Better' uses the commercial settings of a pharmacy, butcher, travel agency and a convenience store. In these images, shelves of coloured boxes of medication, rows of bottles and bags of confectionery, tools and keys hanging on walls, and the edges of counters and tables form lines parallel to the photographs' upper and lower edges. These horizontal linear structures define a static matrix within which Ou's human subjects pose, facing the camera, motionless, like the inanimate objects around them.
 
Ou's reputation to date has rested on this grid structure, one which has been most famously employed by Andreas Gursky in his large, luminous photographs of fashion boutiques, supermarkets and airports. But such a formal approach can become formulaic when repeated throughout a series. Ou herself admits its limitations and relaxes it in her most recent work in Japan.
 
Ou increasingly renders the personal facets of her human subjects. For example, she photographed the boy and girl in Young couple with deer, Nara, 2005, (as seen on the back cover of this issue) for around ten minutes, consequently the subjects were aware of the presence of the camera. However, unlike the figures throughout 'Serving You Better', the boy and girl in Nara do not pose. Rather, they are seamlessly immersed within their environment. At the left edge of the photograph is another couple: ambiguous, perhaps unnoticed presences in an image shaped by indeterminate relationships.
 
The more intimate and ambiguous approach of the new series is a result of Ou's engagement with Japanese culture. Her experiences have ranged from the overwhelming bustle of Tokyo, to the shyness and generosity of individuals. For Ou, disparate elements of Japanese culture such as consumerism, femininity, martial arts, tea ceremonies and calligraphy coalesce into a sense of 'grace'. Ou materialises her experience of this grace by exploiting the soft natural light of Japan, which contrasts to the flash glare which saturates much of her work in Australia.
 
Ou's own cultural identity shapes her art without determining it. She is of Chinese descent, was born in Malaysia, and grew up in Australia (she is currently based in Melbourne), and feels distant from Chinese and Australian Anglo-Saxon histories. Ou is attached to, but does not own such traditions: in their absence she has developed a sense of self in relation to the consumer world in which she sees limitless potential for her art.
 
Ou's early work explored mainly white Australian stereotypes - tram drivers, sales assistants and firemen - while more recent work, such as the 2003 series in Chanchung, China, and her work in Japan, examines similar stereotypes in an Asian context: soldiers, police and athletes. Yet regardless of the culture Ou represents, there remains a tension between how her subjects appear, and how they are. (Ou herself has experienced this tension: in Japan, some assume she speaks Japanese, while in Australia some assume she cannot speak English.)
 
Selina Ou is at a point in her career where she cannot not make photographs: her passion is her profession. She is conscious of the pressure to repeat the aesthetic on which her success rests, but also recognises that experimentation is the basis of artistic growth.
Ou's work in Japan continues but softens the grid approach which structured her early work. There is a new emphasis on natural light, more fluid compositions and on the personalities beneath the appearances of her subjects. Ou's fascination with identity remains constant, but her aesthetic is maturing.
 
Like all who have encountered the cusp between being an 'emerging' and an 'established' artist, Ou is experiencing the tension between the past and future of her art. She is negotiating that cusp with grace.
 
Monte Packham