Hin Chua "After the Fall" (review)

Hin Chua's photographic project “After the Fall” successfully navigates the often complex conversation surrounding the spaces where human made and the natural intersect. In most cases contemporary landscape photography has an axe to grind, playing heavily to one political side or the other reducing the complexity of environmental issues into a dialectic between utopia/dystopia. Granted Chua's photographs rely on certain visual tropes normally associated within the visual rhetoric of utopic/dystopic, but it is his perfect balancing of the two, manufactured being dystopic, and nature being utopic, that provides for an engagement with the subject matter rather than a statement or matter of fact lecture.
Chua's compositions create a visual rhetoric and sophistication presenting a standard of viewing similar to the early works of dadaist photographers and the new phenomenology whom worked to push for a unique photographic language to encompass the dynamic and oft complex relationships in their time period. Chua deftly finds spaces where nature and the manufactured meet not in contrast but in perverse blends of the utopic/dystopic. In the images below a band of brown and dried weeds resemble/mimic the structure of high gain power lines set against a clear blue sky.

In another photograph power lines cut across and grid the sky into square sections above nature and organic shapes and colours.

In other photographs Chua folds his trope and sticks it on its head. An other wise barren landscape of grassy hills and plains are transformed into the surreal nightmare of multi colour plastic bags presenting a hellish uncanny version of flowers in a meadow.


Chua ask his viewers to contemplate the idea and definition of nature and human made. For one side of the environmental political equation this people are boating in a toxic mess masked by the oft invisible poison of toxic waste. The other side, the PR blitz of clean green industry existing side by side with green spaces across the globe.