In 1860, Italian photographer Felice Beato was hired by British military forces to document their imperial strong-arming of China during the Second Opium War. This was only twenty years after Hong Kong had been colonized by the British, during which twenty million had died resisting the takeover.

Photography was still in its infancy; to be a travelling photographer meant hauling a massive, cumbersome camera, along with stacks of fragile glass image plates, and a darkroom complete with developing chemicals. Beato dealt with this difficulty by using Chinese coolies to carry his equipment—but their role was not limited to manual labour. Back then, a photograph could take up to twenty minutes to capture, during which any movement by the subject would result in a blur. And so, Beato often used his coolies to pose in his photographs, dressing them up as soldiers, villagers, or merchants—whatever was needed to contrive the image.¹ He also arranged corpses on the battlefield for compositional purposes, revisiting sites months later to create an oeuvre that would be perceived as objective fact in the West.² Beato’s sensationalized photographs represent the colonial gaze, hyper focused on establishing Western narratives of victory over foreign cultures and designed for the gratification of a Western audience.

Beato took over a hundred photographs while in China, the bulk of which the CCA has prints and scans in its photography collection. As a 2023 CCA Virtual Research Fellow, I examined Beato’s photographs in conversation with traditional Chinese handscroll artworks, like Xu Yang’s epic series of paintings, The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour (1770-1776). Unlike the instant confrontation of a photograph, Chinese handscrolls are read from right to left as the scroll is unravelled, allowing for a “progression through time and space—both the narrative time and space of the image, but also the literal time and distance it takes to experience the entire painting.”¹ Further, unlike still photography, handscrolls utilize the principle of “moving focus,” where the point-of-view depicted in a single scroll will shift as it progresses, which encourages a richer, continuous interaction as the scroll is unravelled.²

In looking at Beato’s work through the lens of Chinese handscrolls, I could decode his work beyond what Vilém Flusser calls the “technical image.”³ A technical image is erroneously perceived as a direct representation of the world because the apparatus used to create it—like a camera—is considered an objective tool, unlike a painter who subjectively translates the world using their hand and paintbrush.

First, using my laptop, I zoomed in on digital scans of Beato’s photos until they became grainy pixels. Then, I panned slowly across each image until I found a blur of a person who must have refused to stand still for Beato’s camera. These blurred figures reappear again and again throughout the hundreds of photographs Beato took in China. Relegated to the margins and shadows, I would bring these defiant blurs to the foreground by drawing them. See Here (Three Scrolls), a pencil-and-graphite drawing on three rice paper rolls spans a total of 55 metres, reinterprets Beato’s photographs as a handscroll.

Resisting Beato’s rigorously staged compositions, See Here articulates the discovery inherent to artistic process. Drawing from right to left, the first few metres of Scroll One contain preliminary sketches where I test out various media—marker, ink, watercolour, charcoal. If I wasn’t satisfied with how I drew something, rather than erasing it, I drew it again on the next blank stretch of paper. When I look at Scroll One today, I feel deeply uncomfortable. Holding many mistakes, it is not what I would typically consider finished, presentable work, and is not shared easily. The pencil marks are tentative as I tried to acclimate to the experience of leaving behind a record of my mistakes. There are many, including the last bit of the handscroll where I left my signature—a wax seal imprinted by a stone stamp carved with my Chinese name, a gift from my parents on a trip to Hong Kong—in the wrong orientation; this lack of familiarity with my “mother tongue” does not surprise me. The vitality of this mistake—and its clear articulation of a diasporic identity—speaks directly to the concerns of the project and the ongoing friction between lives lived in two spaces. In any other project, the error would be rectified, and the meaning lost.

The value of displaying mistakes came slowly to me as I progressed to Scroll Two, I continued finding myself governed by the final output instead of the process. I would focus on parts of the photographs—such as the buildings—where the sharp lines clearly delineated the subject and its context; easier for me than attempting to understand the blurred edge of the shadowy figures and their hidden history. By attempting to make visible the machinations behind Beato’s photographs, I began to sympathize with the photographer. I saw how it was much easier to focus on a simple composition rather than reckoning with the complicated ethics of the unseen colonial system—the hiring of Chinese coolies, the posed corpses, the British military officials who funded the photographs.

For Scroll Three, I re-calibrated my efforts by instead examining only a single area of a single photograph. The photograph is View of the Yonghe Gong [Lamasery of Harmony and Peace] (also known as the Lama Temple) showing Wanfu Ge [Ten Thousand Blessings Hall] and other buildings, Peking (now Beijing), China and the area of interest was a shadow cast by a tall stone wall; I would draw this over and over for the entire eighteen metres of the scroll. I would regularly revisit Xu Yang’s scrolls as a reminder to experiment with “moving focus” by imagining different points-of-view that were outside of the photograph’s perspective.

This narrowed focus achieved a depth of understanding that had previously escaped me. Scroll Three records the process of re-reading Beato’s photograph as I discover the subjects hiding in plain sight. The photograph is dominated by clay-tile roofed buildings bounded by a towering wall; it is only by honing in on a shadow that is falling out of frame that a crowd of people emerges from within the image. While trying to distinguish the shapes of the people from the shadow of the wall, I experienced pareidolia: seeing recognizable shapes in ambiguous or vague data. I became convinced the grainy blurs contained distinguishing details: a packet of frayed cigarettes, a buckle on overalls, or a feather affixed to a cap. My heightened, directed focus on a solitary portion of a singular image opened an unexpected reservoir of feeling, as began to recognise the blurred figures as human. That the discipline of rigorous focus—almost meditative in its intensity—could result in this personal connection was an unexpected outcome of the process and validated the iterative process of the project. Through the act of drawing, I was operating as a subjective apparatus, creating Scroll Three as an inverse to Flusser’s technical image.

Scroll Three ends with individual figures extracted from blurred shadow and formed into their own shape. At first glance, they are simple smudges on paper. But when you look long enough, they become people.