Kurt Tong / Combing for Ice and Jade
Photomonitor UK | October 2019
Born in Hong Kong in 1977, Kurt Tong began his career as a photojournalist based in India in 2003. After gaining his Masters in photography in 2006, he began to focus on personal projects. ‘People’s Park’, a wistful exploration of the now deserted Communist era public spaces won him numerous awards. ‘In Case it Rains in Heaven’, exploring the practice of Chinese funeral offerings, has been widely exhibited and features in several public collections. A monograph of the work was published by Kehrer Verlag in 2011. Below Francesca Marcaccio talked to Tong about ‘Combing for Ice and Jade’, his recent work that was on display at Les Rencontres d’Arles, in France in 2019.
FM: ‘Combing for Ice and Jade’, your recent work that was recently on display at Les Rencontres d’Arles, weaves together personal and public histories, from being a love note to your nanny, to tell the story of Mak Ngan Yuk, one of the last of the ‘combed-up’ women of China—a community of autonomous, selfless women who chose independence over marriage. Would you tell us about what motivated this series?
Kurt Tong: I actually began the project in 2012 but at the time, I felt the approach and the feel was far too similar to the project I had just completed ‘The Queen, The Chairman and I’. It also focused on a number of self-combed women whom I have met though Mak and I felt the direction was too loose. So I shelved the project.
What got me started again was the fact that she was diagnosed with early stages of lung cancer. I ended up meeting her families from China and realised that I didn’t really know much about the person that was so close to me. Also it was a good excuse to spend more time with her. So I decided to revisit the project, only this time, I just wanted to focus on her and perhaps to some extent, our relationship. As the project progressed, it was clear that her struggles, her life and the choices she made really represented thousands of other women in 20th century China, so I wanted her story to be a starting point to explore the whole community of self combed women.
FM: Can you tell us a little about your background and what attracted you to/how you started working with photography?
KT: I was born in Hong Kong but moved to England for schooling at thirteen. After a couple of years of working and travelling around the world, at 20, I just wanted a degree and training that will enable me to travel around the work. So my first degree was actually in health visiting. After graduating, I went to work in India as a health worker for an NGO. It was then that I started using my camera seriously again since High School. I was lucky enough that my first project about disabled children in India won the Luis Valtuena International Humanitarian Photography award. That lead to a career in photography. Although I always felt that I needed to understand more about being a documentary photographer. After a couple of incidents, I realised that I need to go back to school and study more about the ethics of photography. That’s when I returned to the UK to do my Masters in documentary photography.
FM: Your previous work, ‘The Queen, The Chairman and I’, a multilayered narrative picture book dealing with the story of Hong Kong of the last 100 years and the Asian Diaspora through the lives of your own family, is presented as a Chinese teahouse. This project together with ‘Combing for Ice and Jade’, present epic personal expeditions into your own family history. Can you tell me more about why you return them so frequently?
KT: When I was working as a photojournalist, I always felt that I was always only scratching the surfaces of all the stories I worked on, even though I spent months on end with some of my subjects.
After my daughter was born, I realised that I didn’t really have much of an understanding about being Chinese. So my early work after my MA was about exploring my Chinese roots. The more I got into research my family, the more I realise that I like telling stories that are already close to me, something that is already familiar, so that I can find new approaches and new angles of telling these personal stories. In a sense, always having to think more outside the box and push myself.
I am a believer of using personal stories to make commentaries about the larger histories and that everyone has an interesting story to tell.
FM: I would like to talk about the construction of the book. We first meet Mak in the background of your own family snapshots: an arm thrown into frame, a figure outlined by the door. Throughout the book, Mak’s life, her work, her journey, gradually moves into the center of the frame. How did you decide on this composition and sequence?
KT: The project actually started with the 8 passport photos of herself, which were all the photos she could find herself in her apartment. So when I went looking for her in my family archive, it was quite evident that in the early years, she was often on the fringe and over the years, moved into the middle. So that became the backbone of the book.
The book was constructed as my exploration of her life even through the act of finding photographs of her from the passport photos, to the fringe images; since I couldn’t find her, I went to photograph in her hometown and learnt about her childhood. The next part was places where she worked, each job she worked at is represented by a dark, hard-to-make-out image, made using a pinhole camera, the exposure time corresponding to the number of weeks the job lasted. These images are paired with Mak’s own voice, recounting her memories of past employers. I also tracked down images of her from her cousins and friends before she came to work for my family.
After taking her last job which lasted for 37 years, came a second edit of family archive, where it was obvious to see that she became part of my family.
I did think initially that the project would end there, but upon meeting her extended family, I learnt that she did so much for them, so the last section shows off her contribution to the education and businesses of her nieces and nephews, again through a mixture of their family archives and new images I made.
All these ‘Chapters’ are divided by collages of old Chinese women’s magazines, they chart the shifting values, aspirations and messages of society, from the glamour of pre-Communist times, to the economic look of the ’80s. They gave the book a much wider context and allow Mak’s story to be drawn into the wider history.
Throughout the entire book, I did not include a single photograph of her that I have shot. I felt that I didn’t want to dictate how she is represented, which is why the book ends with a selfie of herself.
FM: Much of your recent work, while remaining photographic in essence, has moved towards installation and sculptural works, pushing the boundaries of the medium. What brings you to this shift?
KT: I think photography is very restrictive, it has no beginning and no end, we are always dropped right into the middle of a narrative. So when I am trying to construct these long narratives, I just felt incorporating other mediums allows all the elements of a story to weave together better.
In 2014, I did a whole show with just installation and sculptural works, but soon after the show, I did feel I went too far. I realised that photography is my preferred medium but I am also open to other ideas – participatory, performative or sculptural – if they are better suited to make my point.
In ‘Combing for Ice and Jade’ for example, the exhibitions have included Chinese ink work and an installation of 20,000 coat hangers.
FM: The ‘Combing for Ice and Jade’ series combines new photographs, found photographs and an installation using products from Mak Ngan Yuk’s nephew’s factory. You mentioned that her story is the starting point to explore generations of comb up women, giving a voice to generations of unsung heroines who might otherwise be ignored and forgotten.
Do you view photography as a tool in this way? How do you think photography should respond to the times in which we live?
KT: A lot of artistic mediums can do that but as mentioned above, the disadvantage of photography, about how we are just dropped into the middle of a scene, also work as an advantage here.
Unlike moving images, where we are given the whole picture, the fact that we are only given a tiny sliver of information, it allows the viewers to project their own experience. Like my last project, ‘The Queen, The Chairman and I’, the text is deliberately vague, it gives plenty of room for people to relate their own personal family history into the gaps. By giving a name, a face to the generations of unsung heroines, this makes it easier for viewers to relate, to have someone to root for.
As to whether it responds to the times in which we live in, I want to use the quote I used to open ‘The Queen, The Chairman and I’ book. The current society is so divided, it’s important to remember our recent shared history to remind ourselves that we have a lot in common.
The world is always changing. We have to look inside ourselves to find what stays the same, such as loyalty, our shared history and love for each other. In them, the truth of the past lives on.
FM: Archival material plays an important role in a number of your projects, research and exhibitions. Do you think you have a particular way of seeing the world that’s related to archival research, archival photographs?
KT: I like archival images because we take so many photographs now, so much of them are meaningless. In the old days, many decisions were made before pressing the shutter, and I think I really enjoy both finding a common thread based on some of these decisions and at the same time, reconceptualising them.
A lot of artists are using found images now but when I see them being used purely on a visual level without much interpretation, for me, it’s such a waste.
FM: What will you be working on next?
KT: I have been working on a new project for over two years now. The past nine months I have been a little preoccupied with exhibitions and the two books, so I am hoping to have the new project finalised before next summer. Without giving too much away about how the work will look, here is a little introduction to it:
This project will be the telling of one of the most tragic love stories I have come across. Dealing with love during a time of war, tragedy, forced migration, ghost marriages and suicide.
Three years ago, I was given an old wooden trunk after the death of a friend’s neighbour. The outside was sealed by a taoist seal, and inside the trunk were a number of handwritten letters, old photographs, a severely damaged 8mm film, numerous books from the 1920s, all belonging to a man called Franklin Lung.
After months of research by meticulously combing through all the clues, going as far as visiting a medium to try to contact his spirit, I found out that Franklin was born into a poor family in Hong Kong just after the fall of Imperial China. Through determination, he managed to attend the best university in Shanghai and he became a member of high society, who had trading links with several of the colonial occupiers. He also fell in love and got engaged to Dongyu, the daughter of a high ranking Kuomintang general. In 1948, tragedy struck. Dongyu was on board the SS Kiangya, packed with refugees escaping the communist army when it was sunk by an old Japanese landmine near the mouth of the Huangpu River. Franklin was heartbroken but decided to go ahead with the wedding, marrying her in an elaborate ghost marriage ceremony, where a living person is eternally tied to a deceased person in the spirit world. Soon after the wedding, Franklin fled to Hong Kong. He briefly emigrated to the USA via the 105 annual quota after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. After several failed businesses in San Francisco, he was left penniless. At some point, he returned to Hong Kong, still stricken with grief; he committed suicide by jumping into the Victoria Harbour during Typhoon Wanda in 1962 and presumed drowned.
Despite Franklin’s story happening in the first half of the 20th century, there are very current themes running through it: social mobility, migration and tragedy, and people risking it all for better opportunities. This body of work also examines the superstitious practices around fortune telling, conjuring and many of the less common taoists practices, and people seeking closure and escape through supernatural means.