MPhil graduate Ashley Chin is the winner of the 2025 postgraduate photography competition. She impressed the competition judges with her intuitive narrative arc in her images – from the personal to broader societal reflections.
Fieldwork statement
‘Trapping spirits with words: ghost stories and haunted spaces in contemporary Singapore’
The anthropology of spirits tends to account for what spirits are: idioms of resistance to modernisation, stand-ins to mourn a traumatic past, or the object of mental cultivation.
Southeast Asia has long been a fertile site for spectral studies. Singapore stands out as an analytical puzzle. Here, spirits upset the distinct categories of the high-tech, late-modern cosmopolitan city: intuition/knowledge, belief/culture, past/future, private/public, and racial difference.
Rather than focusing on what spirits are, my research examines how their mediation—how the form and medium through which they manifest as invisible beings (Meyer 2011)—affords these phantasmal crossings.
‘Passing on’
Jonathan Lim, Singaporean playwright and paranormal enthusiast, mid-story on a haunted tour of Changi – the last he gave. A month later, he passed on.
I took this photo to capture a moment of transformation in which his passing on of stories was actively rescripting my experience of the land. Now, his silhouette leads me elsewhere.
A silhouette is a negative, created by contrast. As James Siegel writes, “death” and “witch” are words that attempt to name “the negative which would remain behind any possibility of signification and yet still somehow announce itself.” Working in the negative is then attending to how language attempts to trap negative excess – Jean-Luc Nancy’s ink stain on a word.
‘Feasting’
Just outside the entrance to Old Changi Hospital – regarded as the island’s most haunted site – we perform a simple ritual.
Two candles are lit to invite the wandering ghosts to come forth, prayers are offered with joss sticks, and finally the stack of hell paper is tossed into the bin to be burnt in a big fire. The offering is a gesture of solidarity with stranger ghosts, out of sympathy for their suffering and respect for their being.
When I showed this image to a friend with the ability to "see," she remarked that the scene felt “very busy.” The camera’s failure to capture the ghosts at the feast directs our gaze to the material that mediates their presence – hell paper.
‘Trapped’
A diorama at Haw Par Villa portraying Buddhist monk Tang Sanzhang’s trial against the Spider Sisters as recorded in the epic, Journey to the West.
The world’s only park themed around death and the afterlife, Haw Par Villa is home to Chinese magico-religious dioramas commissioned in the 1930s by a business magnate. Dioramas are fluid, circulating stories affixed to the social landscape.
