An appropriation of ashes: transient aesthetic markers and spiritual place-making as performances of alternative ethnic identities: PROSSER AWARD WINNER 2015

Terence Heng, Singapore Institute of Technology

Terence Heng is a prolific visual sociologist whose work engages with the performance of diasporic ethnic identities through place-making. He has documented the rituals and practices of Taoist spirit mediums, or Tang-ki, in suburban spaces in Singapore; as well as exhumations and the social and cultural life of Bukit Brown Cemetery.

Through these works, Terence sought to use visual methods to present sociological data more concretely and creatively, at times also introducing creative writing to evoke forms of “photopoetry”. Terence has created new and impactful ways to disseminate scholarly work in and beyond academia. His creative and sociological work have been published in high-quality academic journals (e.g. Cultural Geographies, Visual Communication, The Sociological Review), as well as being exhibited internationally at arts institutions and academic conferences alike. Through his focus on Singapore as a site of sociological study, Terence has passionately promoted Visual Sociology in Asia.

Terence’s Website

 

Tang-ki possessed by the spirit of Qi Tian Da Sheng

Hokkien Opera Troupe performing for wandering spirits during the Hungry Ghost Festival

A descendant comes to claim the remains his family members in Bukit Brown Cemetery

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  • I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

    Errol Morris

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    The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something we have lost sight of.

    Zygmunt Bauman

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    There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

    Werner Herzog

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    Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

    William S. Burroughs

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    For any picture, ask yourself what question or questions it might be answering. Since the picture could answer many, questions, we can decide what question we are interested in.

    Howard Becker

  • Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that ‘language’ themselves (just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs). Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way

    Howard Becker

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    Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.

    Nicholas Mirzoeff

  • Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology – looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

    George Lucas

  • If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you’ve got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you’re dumb and blind.

    Salman Rushdie

  • You try your hardest to give people their space, but at moments you know you’re capturing their image in ways they may or may not be okay with. It’s that rocking back and forth between respect and betrayal that I feel like is at the heart of the film.

    Kirsten Johnson

  • We never really know what’s around the corner when we’re filming – what turn a story will take, what a character will do or say to surprise us, how the events in the world will impact our story.

    Barbara Kopple

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    The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.

    Pierre Bourdieu

  • Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn’t develop an adequate language for adequate images.

    Werner Herzog

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    Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.

    Bertolt Brecht

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    If it’s far away, it’s news, but if it’s close at home, it’s sociology.

    James Reston

  • So it is my firm belief, that if you want nowadays, to have a clear and distinct communication of your concepts, you have to use synthetic images, no longer words.

    Vilém Flusser

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    Every photograph promises more than it delivers and delivers more than it intended.

    Steve Harp

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    One advantage of photography is that it’s visual and can transcend language.

    Lisa Kristine

  • Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.

    Henry Rollins

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