British Malaya, which included the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore, was ruled by the British from the late 18th century until the mid-twentieth century. Being the world's biggest source of rubber and tin, Malaya was immensely profitable for the Crown. After WWII, the British Military Administration founded the Malayan Union. However, the establishment came after a 12-year guerilla war, from 1948 to 1960, against British colonialism known as "the Malayan Emergency."

The period before the Emergency was marked by socioeconomic instability, political volatility, and competing claims to power among Malaya's multi-ethnic population. These conditions were ideal for the Communist Party of Malaya to obtain political leverage by influencing trade unions, conducting strikes, and mobilising dissatisfied employees. Its primary objective was to overthrow the British and establish independence for the Malayan states. The armed rebels attacked British colonial police and military institutions, as well as mines, plantations, and railroads, in an effort to impoverish the British and achieve Malayan independence.

In 1948, the colonial authorities declared a state of emergency. To suppress the uprising, the British made a series of dubious choices. They believed the Chinese community supported the armed resistance the most. Thus, with the "Briggs Plan," British authorities forcibly relocated between 500.000 and one million people to the edges of the jungle, placing them in closely guarded camps known as "The New Villages” (Newsinger 2015, 48). The majority of the people interned were ethnically Chinese, despite this group making up less than 10% of Malaya's population (Newsinger). Guards were instructed to shoot anyone who attempted to leave the camps outside of curfew hours. The Plan's ultimate purpose was to break off connections between the mostly ethnic-Chinese rural population and the MNLA in order to deprive the communist insurgents of food, medicine, and manpower. Furthermore, the Malayan Emergency was one of the first instances in history that the defoliant chemical "Agent Orange" was employed by British forces via aerial spraying over the people.

The trauma brought on by the lack of accountability for what took place in Malaya, while the Commonwealth soldiers continue to be commemorated as heroes, is transmitted from the silenced generation along to their descendants. Anti-colonial rebels, deportees, and exiles are still not welcome in Malaysia and Singapore, since the British defamed them as bandits or communist terrorists. Amidst this isolation, the landscape, which has witnessed a great deal of suffering, conceals numerous stories for those who seek to uncover what has been hidden.

Sim Chi Yin analyses the colonial and postcolonial archives of the landscapes by creating a network of war memorials across Malaysia and southern Thailand. Since 2015, she has examined and engaged with the historiographies of this period with photographs, video and sound installations, oral histories, and a practice-based PhD. Her first interest in the period derives from her paternal grandfather, a newspaper editor, who was separated from his family in 1949 and extradited to China as part of large-scale deportation and detention measures undertaken against suspected Communists as part of the Briggs Plan. There, he died at the hands of the Chinese Nationalist Party soldiers, a tragedy that remained a family secret for many years. This prompted her to seek out, interview, and photograph former insurgents and exiles from her grandfather's generation residing in China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, as well as landscapes and objects crucial to the twelve-year insurgency.

We have selected four photographs from the Remnants series from Sim Chi Yin’s exhibition One Day We’ll Understand (2015-ongoing). Remnants questions the colonial and postcolonial histories and historiographies of the 12-year guerrilla war in British Malaya (present-day Malaysia and Singapore), which the British colonial power euphemistically termed the ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948–1960). The artist has created “sites of memory” for this conflict across present-day Malaysia and southern Thailand in her evocative landscape images.

“In one scene at dusk, an elephant emerges out of the jungle thicket, a split-second encounter that transforms into an apparition. A table with empty chairs invites us to imagine that a surreptitious meeting has just been abruptly disbanded—or suggests the absence of the former anti-colonial fighters and people displaced and killed in acts that have still not been accounted for today.”

"Courtesy of Sim Chi Yin and Zilberman, Istanbul/Berlin."

*This narrative is based on the catalogue published in conjunction with Sim Chi Yin’s exhibition “One Day We’ll Understand” at Zilberman Gallery Berlin & Istanbul.