SPOTLIGHT ON:
Lenne Chai
Los Angeles-based photographer Lenne Chai is a prominent voice in gender politics and creator of nostalgia-scapes in her fashion editorials and commercial campaigns.
BY NICK RICE
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As Gay Pride month draws to a close, we acknowledge the Singapore-born, New York and Los Angeles-based photographer Lenne Chai, a prominent voice in gender politics and creator of yester-year nostalgia-scapes in her fashion editorials and commercial campaigns.
Starting out as a photographer in 2010, Chai worked for a range of fashion titles and major commercial brands including Gucci and Spotify. By 2015, Chai was experimenting with other mediums and her inaugural exhibition was a video installation inspired by karaoke. An interactive mixed-media art installation titled Salvation Made Simple followed in 2018 and explored the conflations between religion and commerce. In 2019, A 377A Wedding, a photo series inspired by her experiences as a queer woman in Singapore, was shown at Objectifs visual arts space in Singapore and featured in BBC World News, Dazed, CNN, among others.
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“...if I keep looking at fashion photography I will never be able to innovate past what is already done.“
Chai’s recent shoot BELACAN (2022) imagines the U.S.A. as a place in which schools are safe and inclusive spaces, and she has also made a foray into the world of NFTs via a collaboration with award-winning photographer turned 3D virtual model creator, Shavonne Wong. The series, entitled By Proxy (2022) depicts an imaginary young girl’s transition from girlhood to adolescence, sculpted digitally.
Reflecting on her career to date, she said to art enthusiast platform CoBo Social, “For a very long time, I kept trying to market myself as a fashion photographer… but I’ve come to be more comfortable with my work. I realised that the fashion industry looks to people with new ideas, so if I keep looking at fashion photography I will never be able to innovate past what is already done. To make any kind of interesting work or to actually have a point of view or anything interesting to say, I can’t be looking at other people. It’s also a realisation that I just want to make good work. It doesn’t matter what the work looks like, and it doesn’t have to be fashion.”