Lim Yu Beng
Theatre Practitioner
Lim Yu-Beng was my guinea pig 20 years ago when I started taking portraits. I took nine rolls of film and I only liked two shots. This time around, we just had a nice long catch up. He did not attempt to act, so all the drama you see is from his telling of actual life stories. And we got so many intense portraits with his unvarnished self. As he says, “Journey is everything.”
In 1994, in a period of deep flux, I walked into a contemporary dance masterclass in London, joining about a dozen extremely competent-looking white girls, and one Chinese guy in the corner. Not wanting to be lumped together as the two Chinese boys (it was the ’90s, folks), I crossed to the other end of the room and took the opposite corner. At the end of the class, thankful nobody I knew had seen me struggling to keep up, I was just walking out when I heard this voice say, “Eh, ACS (Anglo Chinese School), right? Lim Yu-Beng!”
And that was it. Twenty-eight years later, Ngiap Heng still observes me, catches me, and reveals me. Even when I think I’m slipping away unnoticed.