Two Journeymen: Wildlife Photography
Two Journeymen: Wildlife Photography (Pentago House, Kuala Lumpur, 2023) brought together the practices of Captain Sim Yong Wah and lawyer-photographer Ng Wymin in a dialogue about scale, attention, and the ethics of looking. Set not in a white-cube gallery but within Pentago House, a century-old shophouse, the exhibition emphasised how context inflects viewing: photographs of flight, drift, and encounter resonated within a space already layered with history. All proceeds supported the National Autism Society of Malaysia (NASOM).
Sim’s photographs move from macro to micro. Beginning with cloud streets, coastlines, and the drift of weather, his images locate individual lives within larger systems of migration, air currents, and ecological flows. His frames are less about spectacle than about orientation—reading the world as rhythm and relation, where colour, blur, and pattern reveal symbiosis at scale. In contrast, Wymin works from micro to macro. His entry point is the claw mark, the gaze, the moment of pause before flight. He waits until the animal recognises the camera, allowing presence to widen into landscape. Here, the backdrop is no longer scenery but a stage negotiated through the charge of recognition.
Together, the two approaches suggest that looking is never neutral. Sim proposes that we see through systems; Wymin insists on the ethics of being seen. Their oscillation raises questions central to wildlife photography and beyond: What changes when the subject looks back? How might attention and orientation, biography and discipline, shape the image and the viewer alike? In its movement between sky and sea, claw and gaze, the exhibition unsettled the idea of photography as passive documentation, reframing it instead as a practice of relation, negotiation, and shared presence.
