Siew Guang Hong
 

human crocodile reflects on how we construct our understandings of non-human animals—utilising what we are familiar with to connect to what we might have limited access to. The work directly references the myth of a vengeful Iban warrior who reincarnated into Bujang Senang, a man-eating saltwater crocodile. Workshopping this transformation, Siew warps his own body parts in analogy to the body parts of the crocodile, echoing a human propensity to project and compare ourselves to the other.

Echoing the migratory behaviours of the saltwater crocodile, the multichannel video takes an archipalegic form of presentation; decentralising across different areas and adopting different kinds of screens, heights, angles and sizes. The composition (zoom and angle) of the video is contingent on the  space its substrate occupies and changes according to the way the screen is presented. This further fragments the corporeality of the crocodile in favour of an almost cubist becomingness of the human-conceived animal.

The prints are another representation of the human crocodile, presenting its UV map. It exhibits the ways in which the human body contorts and fragments to shape our cultural imaginations of the non-human, othered animal body. The way these prints were rendered directly references the “Body without Organs“; i.e., the body without organisation. In its protean amalgamation of inarticulate flesh, the maps of the human crocodile are almost counterpoint to the analogies presented by the videos.