Triggered!: Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
© Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee, from Were you a flower to tuck away?
This image is a part of a body of work, Were you a flower to tuck away?, a series of personal yearning and mourning for the loss of my cultural heritage. Using my maternal grandmother’s funeral as metaphor for the death and subsequent disconnection between myself and a vanishing Peranakan heritage, I combined photographs taken on her funeral with that of my own. The image you see here is a re-activated photograph I found in my aunt’s shoebox, tucked away for years, maybe even decades. When U was rummaging through the photographs, I came across several black and white small prints of my grandmother’s funeral. It was the first time I had seen her aged face—and that struck me. I had seen pictures of her when she was younger, but not any farther. Most of all, what—or rather who—remains unclear is the person who captured those moments. And it is perhaps with this uncertainty, this murkiness that I relate to the indeterminacy of my belonging; it pulls me back to this photograph again and again, just like a moth to a flame.
More about Were you a flower to tuck away?
Elizabeth grew up on a diet of Disney and Carl’s Jr. Apart from the occasional Chinese meal, the rest of her childhood was spent consuming the West: DK encyclopaedias, McDonald’s drive throughs, and Enid Blyton. She rejected her Peranakan heritage almost completely in her teenage years—it was too familiar to be desired; it wasn’t ‘exotic’ enough. A decade later, she finds herself stringing remains together, retrieving forgotten memorabilia from what feels like a past life. Reactivating photographs from her grandmother’s funeral, she attempts to bridge the time-space gap with her images. Hours spent threading chrysanthemums (a Chinese symbol of loss and healing) developed into a journey of contemplation on a salvaged heritage—real or imagined.
