| A long time ago, I was an activist. An animal-rights activist. When I went to art school, I failed to convince myself what I was doing with my work was necessary. It can be useful, but it was not necessary. One day I found myself weeping over my images of animals suffering in cages, and I realized my work was exploitative while hiding behind the notion of being informative. A visit to the tiger farms in China made me realize that management is the key to understanding our relationship with animals, not ethics. Sometimes I believe that my obsession with animals stems from the fact that I grew up in a local zoo. All that I ever saw on television was the National Geographic Channel. |  |
Zhao Ren-Hui
A long time ago, I was an activist. An animal-rights activist. When I went to art school, I failed to convince myself what I was doing with my work was necessary. It can be useful, but it was not necessary. One day I found myself weeping over my images of animals suffering in cages, and I realized my work was exploitative while hiding behind the notion of being informative. A visit to the tiger farms in China made me realize that management is the key to understanding our relationship with animals, not ethics.
Sometimes I believe that my obsession with animals stems from the fact that I grew up in a local zoo. All that I ever saw on television was the National Geographic Channel. All I ever saw when I traveled were zoos. More animals. My first arts grant as an artist allowed me to formally address my obsession with zoos. In a period of one month, I visited a total of 27 zoos in Europe. After that, I realized I wasn’t really interested in watching animals. I was more interested in observing humans watching animals.
Recently I started to work for an institution, the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ). As an artist-in-residence within the ICZ, I am given unlimited access to their archives and research. Some of these materials interest me more than others. For example, I was more interested in the methods they employed when they collected animal data for study than to know why a certain species needed to be protected.
Certain documents lend themselves to the absurd. There was a huge file with a long list of names. The document measured almost 120 meters in length. A scientist printed this list in 1998. It was a list of all the animals that were known to science at that time. The point of the list was to find out if there were duplicate species in the list and to verify if recent discoveries of new species were really new. The research paper was titled “The unknowable discovery of species.”
I was fortunate enough to be invited as the photographer on one of the research trips by the ICZ to Pulau Pejantan. For me, the discovery of the island’s mystery truly began on the third day onboard Sea-Farer II with sudden loud splashes in the ocean, which at the end of the expedition I realized were caused by diving birds.
