Nicholas Constant

Fēnliè

My Grandmother's brother and father were both beheaded by the Japanese during the occupation of Malaysia in WWII. This meant she had to flee the country with her mother at the age of 3. With this leaving of the country, all ties to her heritage were severed. In 2016 I went out to Malaysia to explore how atrocities have many indirect effects, including myself, not feeling as having ties to Chinese culture. From this trip I managed to find long lost family through a common ancestor and was able to fill in their family tree for them. While exploring my family history, I also looked at the locations of atrocities and the inspection centres which led to these atrocities, to contemplate whether my family would have been subject to these locations. I also look at Singapore as a large amount of the Japanese occupation was carried out there. I am British, and as the Japanese occupation used to be the British occupation, coming back there as a British person is an interesting contrast that I will further explore.

Nicholas Constant

With an interest in the spectacle of modern warfare, I explore spaces in which conflicts occur. I am particularly interested in the indirect effects on war; how they surface in the everyday and how these issues are dealt with in absence of mainstream media. Using a simple, unintrusive approach to many of the projects, I attempt to make invisible subjects visible through the use of landscape and context. Photographing in a slow and quiet manner, I try to force the viewer to study the image to extract the most information they can to then be reinforced by their own contextual knowledge and personal views. Consciously realising my place as a western spectator of modern conflict issues, I try to make work which aims to resonate with the western viewer in a nonconfrontational way, as I believe empathy to be most effective when the viewer pieces the puzzle together for themselves.