Siew Guang Hong
 

Rounding Around and Dreaming to Fly consists of rendered images printed on custom-cut panels. These images are derived from a 3D animation of an Asian arowana swimming in a circular motion. The fish’s surface texture is constructed from photographs of the artist’s own skin, digitally mapped and wrapper around the body of the fish.

This strategy reflects on the analogies people draw between themselves and animals to understand their “othered” counterparts: fins resemble hands, scales resemble skin. Such analogies appeal to familiarity, enabling forms of connection and myth-making. At the same time, it reveals the anthropocentric frameworks through which non-human life is commonly perceived and, in cases like with the arowana, reproduced. The fish is no longer just a species shaped by evolution and environment. Rather, it is has emerged as a contemporary object of the gaze; assembled from biological investigation, cultural imagination, selective breeding, autobiographical encounter and now digital pseudo-realistic representation.