Siew Guang Hong
 

convergence II scales the image of a spider crab up, framing the animal beyond its ordinal conception as a specimen to be studied. Rather, slices of the crab are decontextualised to mimic the visual language of topographical maps or even Chinese ink painting, with the animal’s spikes and grooves resembling the mountains and valleys of a larger ecosystem. Siew responds to colonial traditions of taxonomy documentation that serve to capture animal (non-human and human) bodies; channelling the body-as-landscape that destabilises subject-object binaries and point toward fluid notions of becoming.

The crab body itself is composed by collages of the artist’s hands and feet rather than a “real” spider crab, echoing the way these transformative strategies are co-opted by queer subjectivities; to mimic, to hide, to belong, to converge.