‘Extreme Asie’
introduction by James Burnet
Double Images
Wars, revolutions, coups d’état and dictatorships have left indelible marks on the history of Asia in the past half century. Even the untenable occurred, the genocide in Cambodia. Countless lives were swept away in these cycles of violence. How many is impossible to know, even approximately. Yet not one of these victims can be treated as an abstract number.
Memory has been damaged, lost in a vague recollection that is falsely equated with the act of forgetting. Rewinding spools of images is taboo. The past has no words. In Cambodia, men and women are waging a desperate struggle to “understand” how this murderous insanity let loose. They experience untold pain, harboured in deep solitude. The West, meanwhile, has renounced efforts to question its own memory regarding the how and why of Cambodia’s mass graves. It is much easier to intervene to safeguard the temples of Angkor. Indecence has been carried to new heights.
When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they decreed an “extreme revolution.” A quarter of a century slipped by. Cambodians continue to sleepwalk their way through life’s shadows. “When you’re scared, your fear infiltrates all generations, and thousands of souls ahead and behind you are humiliated,” writes Nikos Kazantzakis in Ascèse. It is this fear and humiliation that the director of the Centre for Genocide in Phnom Penh, the researcher Youk Chang and the filmmaker Rithy Panh have decided to fight.
A strange protest took place in Cambodia after the fall of Pol Pot in 1979. It was called the “Day of Hate.” A day in the year when the Cambodian people, driven by a Pavlovian reflex, had the right to hate their former tormentors in exchange for wiping clean the slate of memory. This sinister comedy went on for a decade. You had to hate on order without the slightest hope of asking questions about how this wreckage, undocumented by images, could have happened. Aside from portraits of torture victims found at the Tuol Sleng extermination centre in Phnom Penh, not a single photograph testifies to what Cambodia was for more than three years: a vast prisoners’ camp, outfitted to torture and kill.
While Cambodia has its place among the most regrettable pages of 20th century history, many hopes were shattered elsewhere in Asia. Does anyone remember the nearly sacrificial death of hundreds of students in Bangkok, first in 1973 with the advent of democracy, then in 1976, when students moved to save this fledgling democracy in the face of generals and their henchmen?
Since 1932, when Thailand’s absolute monarchy was toppled and replaced by a constitutional one, one coup d’état has succeeded another to the tune of alliances and ruptures between military clans. The Second World War did not change the ritual: the kingdom sided with the Japanese invader. But a democratic awakening occurred in December 1973.
Against the backdrop of tumultuous events in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and the quasi inevitable defeat of the United States in Indochina, students in Bangkok, mostly from Thammasat University near the Royal Palace, led an uprising against the dictatorship. After several days of civil war, the ruling military triumvirate was forced to flee for shelter under the wing of other dictatorial regimes in the region. For the first time, King Bhumibol Adulyadej openly stepped in and sided with the students. Yet three years later, the king remained impassive when these same students were massacred. Many were lynched and burnt alive in front of Thammasat by the army and right-wing militia.
There was also Vietnam. It was the war that Americans wanted, like a crusade against communism, without ever questioning the meaning of sacrificing hundreds of young men and women. Then, as Vietnam savoured its victory over the American superpower, came the time to honour the war’s heroes. But hundreds of thousands of the missing were ignored. “War is a world without home nor roots, a pitiful wandering, grandiose, without end; a world without men, women, feelings or desires; the most desolate, desperate terrifying world that man has invented,” writes the Vietnamese Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War. In every home, tarnished pictures standing on altars to ancestors testify to the misery of these souls that have been wandering for twenty-five years. And after surviving a war or a dictatorship, one can legitimately ask whether this culture of violence is truly a thing of the past.
“There are terrible differences between wars, but also terrible similarities. You sleep with the dead, you comfort the dead, you live with the living who are going to die,” writes the photographer Don McCullin. Philip Blenkinsop lived through this voyage of initiation: in Cambodia during the July 1997 coup d’état; in Borneo during clashes between Dayaks — the Christian and animist descendants of head hunters — and Madurese settlers who are Muslims from Java; or again, during the massacres in East Timor.
Since 1988 he has been travelling across Asia, a continent suffering from amnesia. He puts his bags down in megacities, symbols of the denial of culture and history in the name of speculation and grandiose ambitions. Here, rural populations from impoverished regions land in search of a “civilization of comfort” whose first virtue has been to bulldoze over the past with the aid of heavy machinery.
By night, in this chaotic universe, young motorcyclists engage in deadly races in Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Forced to slow down, the horde grants the dying no more than a casual look. These inanimate wrapped bodies recall those of young soldiers hidden in bags and lined up along the banks of rice fields over a quarter of a century ago.
Wars have played their part in shaping the new face of these urban monstrosities. Thailand was a “terrestrial aircraft carrier” for the flying fortresses that bombed the neighbouring countries of Indochina. This kicked off Bangkok’s transformation. Asia’s Venice sank as concrete ran into its canals. Places of pleasure were warranted for soldiers who shared the night, the desperate search for drugs, with other victims: prostitutes, often young girls sold by impoverished families. Philip Blenkinsop’s eye fits into a historic continuity: violence in cities may be more banal but no less primitive than that of the battlefield.
Animals, meanwhile, do not wage wars. They don’t receive much inheritance. They have little to give, if not life. Their death however is often tragic, as if the annihilation had to be fairly shared. By showing us a dog slaughterhouse, Philip Blenkinsop pursues his quest for Asia’s daily existence, far from the idyllic and erroneous images sold to tourists. He puts what might be a full stop to a myth and offers each one of us a two-tiered reading: the execution of dogs invariably makes us think of the killings under the Khmer Rouge, and their piled up corpses to the mass graves of those times. The terrifying equivalence of death’s face on a young motorcyclist and on the mouth of a dog.
A rigid body emerges from the mud, hands outstreched in an imploring gesture, face turned toward the sky in sign of hope. Or simply in a quest to forget, through alcohol or drugs, a desperate life in the slums of these big cities. Philip Blenkinsop gives us free rein to reach our own conclusions. He takes the same approach when he shows us a vegetarian festival in southern Thailand where, to purify themselves, worshippers pierce their cheeks with saws that are not meant to provoke pain, nor even loss of blood, or again, when he photographs the chest of a man adorned with an animal carcass.
Philip Blenkinsop exhibited his work at the 1999 Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan. His photos shocked this venerable gathering of photojournalists. But such is not the impact sought by this generous Australian. He refuses to take us hostage with his photographs. Instead, he tries to give us keys to understand this other Asia, one that is often inaccessible simply because it is all too visible. Here, everything happens in the open without any restraint. Philip Blenkinsop explores this paradox without ever falling into the trap of voyeurism or obscenity.
His independence is the best safeguard against all abuse inherent to this type of endeavour. He affirms his freedom of expression. Philip Blenkinsop’s images have never been published in newspapers — they cannot be tamed. You have to accept their harshness to ask yourself, at least once, something about the ongoing lie that we maintain with Asia.
His work is thus invaluable: he seeks to unveil, with an indispensable distance from his subject, a violence that reigns each day. He refuses to show us what might resemble a great fresco, whether desperate rural populations or sordid shantytowns. The tragic outcome of each human being is far more eloquent. And it goes well beyond the testimony of a photojournalist.
James Burnet
Wars, revolutions, coups d’état and dictatorships have left indelible marks on the history of Asia in the past half century. Even the untenable occurred, the genocide in Cambodia. Countless lives were swept away in these cycles of violence. How many is impossible to know, even approximately. Yet not one of these victims can be treated as an abstract number.
Memory has been damaged, lost in a vague recollection that is falsely equated with the act of forgetting. Rewinding spools of images is taboo. The past has no words. In Cambodia, men and women are waging a desperate struggle to “understand” how this murderous insanity let loose. They experience untold pain, harboured in deep solitude. The West, meanwhile, has renounced efforts to question its own memory regarding the how and why of Cambodia’s mass graves. It is much easier to intervene to safeguard the temples of Angkor. Indecence has been carried to new heights.
When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, they decreed an “extreme revolution.” A quarter of a century slipped by. Cambodians continue to sleepwalk their way through life’s shadows. “When you’re scared, your fear infiltrates all generations, and thousands of souls ahead and behind you are humiliated,” writes Nikos Kazantzakis in Ascèse. It is this fear and humiliation that the director of the Centre for Genocide in Phnom Penh, the researcher Youk Chang and the filmmaker Rithy Panh have decided to fight.
A strange protest took place in Cambodia after the fall of Pol Pot in 1979. It was called the “Day of Hate.” A day in the year when the Cambodian people, driven by a Pavlovian reflex, had the right to hate their former tormentors in exchange for wiping clean the slate of memory. This sinister comedy went on for a decade. You had to hate on order without the slightest hope of asking questions about how this wreckage, undocumented by images, could have happened. Aside from portraits of torture victims found at the Tuol Sleng extermination centre in Phnom Penh, not a single photograph testifies to what Cambodia was for more than three years: a vast prisoners’ camp, outfitted to torture and kill.
While Cambodia has its place among the most regrettable pages of 20th century history, many hopes were shattered elsewhere in Asia. Does anyone remember the nearly sacrificial death of hundreds of students in Bangkok, first in 1973 with the advent of democracy, then in 1976, when students moved to save this fledgling democracy in the face of generals and their henchmen?
Since 1932, when Thailand’s absolute monarchy was toppled and replaced by a constitutional one, one coup d’état has succeeded another to the tune of alliances and ruptures between military clans. The Second World War did not change the ritual: the kingdom sided with the Japanese invader. But a democratic awakening occurred in December 1973.
Against the backdrop of tumultuous events in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam and the quasi inevitable defeat of the United States in Indochina, students in Bangkok, mostly from Thammasat University near the Royal Palace, led an uprising against the dictatorship. After several days of civil war, the ruling military triumvirate was forced to flee for shelter under the wing of other dictatorial regimes in the region. For the first time, King Bhumibol Adulyadej openly stepped in and sided with the students. Yet three years later, the king remained impassive when these same students were massacred. Many were lynched and burnt alive in front of Thammasat by the army and right-wing militia.
There was also Vietnam. It was the war that Americans wanted, like a crusade against communism, without ever questioning the meaning of sacrificing hundreds of young men and women. Then, as Vietnam savoured its victory over the American superpower, came the time to honour the war’s heroes. But hundreds of thousands of the missing were ignored. “War is a world without home nor roots, a pitiful wandering, grandiose, without end; a world without men, women, feelings or desires; the most desolate, desperate terrifying world that man has invented,” writes the Vietnamese Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War. In every home, tarnished pictures standing on altars to ancestors testify to the misery of these souls that have been wandering for twenty-five years. And after surviving a war or a dictatorship, one can legitimately ask whether this culture of violence is truly a thing of the past.
“There are terrible differences between wars, but also terrible similarities. You sleep with the dead, you comfort the dead, you live with the living who are going to die,” writes the photographer Don McCullin. Philip Blenkinsop lived through this voyage of initiation: in Cambodia during the July 1997 coup d’état; in Borneo during clashes between Dayaks — the Christian and animist descendants of head hunters — and Madurese settlers who are Muslims from Java; or again, during the massacres in East Timor.
Since 1988 he has been travelling across Asia, a continent suffering from amnesia. He puts his bags down in megacities, symbols of the denial of culture and history in the name of speculation and grandiose ambitions. Here, rural populations from impoverished regions land in search of a “civilization of comfort” whose first virtue has been to bulldoze over the past with the aid of heavy machinery.
By night, in this chaotic universe, young motorcyclists engage in deadly races in Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). Forced to slow down, the horde grants the dying no more than a casual look. These inanimate wrapped bodies recall those of young soldiers hidden in bags and lined up along the banks of rice fields over a quarter of a century ago.
Wars have played their part in shaping the new face of these urban monstrosities. Thailand was a “terrestrial aircraft carrier” for the flying fortresses that bombed the neighbouring countries of Indochina. This kicked off Bangkok’s transformation. Asia’s Venice sank as concrete ran into its canals. Places of pleasure were warranted for soldiers who shared the night, the desperate search for drugs, with other victims: prostitutes, often young girls sold by impoverished families. Philip Blenkinsop’s eye fits into a historic continuity: violence in cities may be more banal but no less primitive than that of the battlefield.
Animals, meanwhile, do not wage wars. They don’t receive much inheritance. They have little to give, if not life. Their death however is often tragic, as if the annihilation had to be fairly shared. By showing us a dog slaughterhouse, Philip Blenkinsop pursues his quest for Asia’s daily existence, far from the idyllic and erroneous images sold to tourists. He puts what might be a full stop to a myth and offers each one of us a two-tiered reading: the execution of dogs invariably makes us think of the killings under the Khmer Rouge, and their piled up corpses to the mass graves of those times. The terrifying equivalence of death’s face on a young motorcyclist and on the mouth of a dog.
A rigid body emerges from the mud, hands outstreched in an imploring gesture, face turned toward the sky in sign of hope. Or simply in a quest to forget, through alcohol or drugs, a desperate life in the slums of these big cities. Philip Blenkinsop gives us free rein to reach our own conclusions. He takes the same approach when he shows us a vegetarian festival in southern Thailand where, to purify themselves, worshippers pierce their cheeks with saws that are not meant to provoke pain, nor even loss of blood, or again, when he photographs the chest of a man adorned with an animal carcass.
Philip Blenkinsop exhibited his work at the 1999 Visa pour l’image festival in Perpignan. His photos shocked this venerable gathering of photojournalists. But such is not the impact sought by this generous Australian. He refuses to take us hostage with his photographs. Instead, he tries to give us keys to understand this other Asia, one that is often inaccessible simply because it is all too visible. Here, everything happens in the open without any restraint. Philip Blenkinsop explores this paradox without ever falling into the trap of voyeurism or obscenity.
His independence is the best safeguard against all abuse inherent to this type of endeavour. He affirms his freedom of expression. Philip Blenkinsop’s images have never been published in newspapers — they cannot be tamed. You have to accept their harshness to ask yourself, at least once, something about the ongoing lie that we maintain with Asia.
His work is thus invaluable: he seeks to unveil, with an indispensable distance from his subject, a violence that reigns each day. He refuses to show us what might resemble a great fresco, whether desperate rural populations or sordid shantytowns. The tragic outcome of each human being is far more eloquent. And it goes well beyond the testimony of a photojournalist.
James Burnet
