Non-Fiction Island consists of landscape photographs and 309 moon prints made from acrylic plate. The project interrogates the intricate entanglements of power that flow between the individual, society, and culture.

In probing questions of identity, I discovered a parallel between identity and the act of looking at images. Photography, it seems, is fated to be split in two: the image as such, and the content it signifies. This bifurcation concerns not only the photograph but also our perception of reality itself – what lies before our eyes and what takes shape within our minds. How does the audience negotiate and reconcile what is seen with what is known? These questions form the central axis of this project.

Landscape as a tradition in fine arts has a history rooted in the colonial era, when distant territories were framed, painted, and possessed through the artist’s eye. To depict a landscape was often to assert power over space and to translate the unknown into the familiar. A piece of trashed plastic was found in the studio bin; its shape evoked, almost inadvertently, the silhouette of an island. Out of this fragment of waste emerged an image bound to both memory and longing — the desire to claim, to invent, to make it my own. By transforming it into an image visible to everyone in the studio, I reimagine the act of landscape-making: no longer as a gaze of ownership, but as a reconsideration of materials, contexts, and belonging.

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Non-Fiction Island Triptych 
2022-2025 
Archival pigment print mounted in acrylic frame 
31 x 20 cm