Dance is the love of my life. I rarely feel more alive than when I am dancing, it is a combination of physicality, intelligence and expression. However, I studied engineering until I was twenty-nine years old and when I entered London Contemporary Dance School. It was one of the greatest years in my life and it broke my heart when I realized that I had started too late to have a meaningful career in dance.
I returned to Singapore and found that even though dance could not be a career, I could live it vicariously through photography. And it was this idea that I could capture the essence of dance in an image that made me pursue photography. For a decade, the pursuit of dance photography fueled a career where I took wedding photographs and commercial portraits so that I could collaborate with dancers.
It was in 2008 that I did the exhibition Dance Me Through The Dark. It was the culmination of my pursuit of traditional dance photography and I realized that I had to find new challenges and grow as an artist. I had to ask harder questions than simply marvel at the dancer’s body. With Starlight Sonata, I started to look at bigger themes like identity and the energy of dancers.
As proud as I am of my original dance photography, it has become more intriguing to push my understanding of dance and how to represent it in different ways. And the physicality of the body continues to inform my art practice, even as I leave photography for other forms of expression.
Tan Ngiap Heng 