Sean Cham

Rehearsal for 302 (2025)
Digital prints, animation, and sculptural assemblage (paper, photo prints, cardboard, bamboo sticks)

While researching the history of Chinese servants in colonial Singapore, I came across a photograph taken around 1890, numbered 303, with the accompanying caption ‘Chinese boy serving his master’ from the National Archives of Singapore collection. The photo was shot by the studio of Gustav Richard Lambert, a German photographer who set up a photography business in Singapore in the 1860s. The photographic print shows a Chinese man slightly hunched over and carrying a tray, attending to a fair-skinned man whose back is towards the camera. Nothing was noted of the Chinese man’s identity — no name, no age, and certainly nothing about his family or where he came from.

Much later, while conducting archival research on the Dutch Empire through the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) image collection, I encountered the same Chinese man unexpectedly. This time, he is standing alone in front of a backdrop, carrying a tray of alcohol and beverages. The photograph was numbered 301, with the accompanying caption ‘Chinese boy on duty’, from the studio of G R Lambert. Again, no other information about him was recorded, only that he was a Chinese bediende (servant) in Singapore.

Two photographs of the same individual, held in the archives of two different countries. Who was he? Where did he come from? What was his story? What was image 302, was it also a picture of him?

Rehearsal for 302 is an exercise in recovering lost histories, through acts of re-enactment, repetition, juxtaposition, layering, splicing, and projecting. Part of that exercise involved using Generative AI to imagine what was and what could have been. I draw parallels between the work of a historian and generative AI, both rely on existing sources or data points to draw plausible conclusions and outcomes (extrapolation), as well as to highlight connections between them (interpolation). Both the archive and the machine are shaped by structures of power, and are fundamentally incomplete. 

Central to this work, my body became a vessel through which historical imagination could take shape. I embody this anonymous man whose likeness is forever trapped in the archive, yet his life has been erased and omitted from the records. As a Singaporean-Chinese now living in London, my life as an immigrant intersects with his.

Exhibition Summary

• Exhibited:
  • Foam, Amsterdam (2026)
• Featured:
  • Foam Magazine no.68 (2026)

Cham’s Rehearsal for 302 unfolds as a work of speculative fiction, staging possible iterations to fill the void. The artist’s own body becomes the primary vessel for this exercise, assuming the servant’s role to perform both the gestures and implied hierarchies of the original photographs. Inevitably, the performance also brings Cham’s position – as a Singaporean artist living in London – into subtle focus, carrying its own entanglements with the legacies of empire and migration.

Visually, Cham’s strategies for rehearsing this absent photograph are varied: in his own terms, the project hinges upon combinations of “re-enactment, repetition, juxtaposition, layering, splicing, and projecting.” Isolating and reassembling the images’ details, the flatness of the archive is further prised open. Alongside these manual approaches, digital techniques propel the project into more speculative territory. At times, Cham deploys AI to probe at the limits of the frame itself. Meanwhile, AI-assisted efforts to ‘complete’ the missing 302 place the servant figure in settings that feel conspicuously exoticised – where ornate ‘oriental’ furniture, hanging lanterns and creeping jungle palms echo the visual tropes that Cham dissected in his earlier Eastern Promise series. 

In the artist’s mind, there are clear parallels between the workings of AI and the methodologies of a historian. In the simplest terms, both attempt to approximate a coherent picture from a set of data points – but if official records are themselves so skewed by historical biases, granting only partial visibilities, and telling only particular stories on particular terms, how far can the machine imagine beyond these horizons? For Cham, inserting himself into the archive through use of AI tools is a means to underline this feedback loop between images past and present, recalling how the production and distribution of colonial photographs cemented lasting ideas about race, class and labour.

As the series reaches its close, we know little more about the man in the photograph, nor how his story might have ended. Cham’s performances, though, were never conceived as an act of biographical recovery; instead, the servant’s presence circulates through a series of possibilities, freeing him temporarily from the rigid terms of his original depiction. For another image, Cham appears outdoors, dressed once more in the servant’s attire. With his back to camera, he kneels down, setting up a tripod on a lawn flanked by verdant trees. For the first time, the tight confines of the studio give way to open space; acts of authorship, meanwhile, displace those of service. Here in the garden, the frame broadens – there are, it seems, new possibilities still to be rehearsed.


George King, Foam Magazine no.68

Parts of these images have been generated using artificial intelligence tools.