On her seminal book On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that our world is increasingly becoming that of a world of images, where our existence needs to be evidenced as photographs that will outlast us. Travel justifies this even more by “becoming a strategy for accumulating photographs,” hence, the “if there are no pictures, it didn’t happen” adage. This was capitalized further by Kodak in 1903 when it introduced the Folding Pocket camera designed for postcard-size film. It allowed the general public to make postcards from any photograph they have taken themselves: personalized postcards sent with the ubiquitous “Wish you were here.” However, in Yasmin Sison-Ching’s series of watercolors that revisits the travel photos of her maternal grandparents, this expression of sentiment for a wistful presence is rather washed out to be generic images of sites. Titled “Pepe and Seang’s Grand Vacation,” what could’ve been the couple’s documented tour of Europe and US in 1976 are expunged off their specificity to be these commonplace indexes of place. Yasmin emphasizes the disconnect of time and space with the experience of actually being there. It is but an imagined space appropriated as field studies in foraging through lapses in personal histories. The use of a medium that emphasizes the tenuous nature of memory, its transparency bleeding into paper, melts forms into wobbly uncertainties and fades colors into a permanent patina of loss. Though usually used in quick sketches, it requires time for each layer to dry despite it being a water-based medium. A seemingly diametric opposite of the snapshot, yet it fades in congruence with the languidness of its accumulated layers of tonal washes.

Mariano Ching’s use of watercolor in his series “Road Fever” anticipates John Singer Sargeant’s appraisal of a seemingly innocuous medium: that to paint using such is an “act of making the best of an impending disaster.” We are presented with vistas of ruin landscaped with the debris of a civilization; we are yoked to its familiar remnants. They picture it in the aftermath of a disaster: calm, foreboding, ashened by the fossils of such trauma.

Early watercolor drawings were used to document the ‘new world’: to illustrate as John James Audubon and Mark Catesby have intended for their detailed drawings of flora and fauna, newly found in an America at the infancy of its nationhood, a medium for the ‘new world’ ripe for discovery. Their illustrations became an invaluable compendium in the early studies of natural history. History in such a persuasion is read through a progression of innovation and development through the highway of scientific and technological advancement. Mariano pictures them as detours of a journey that has strayed too far in its ever-curious reach for the road less traveled.

Yasmin’s and Mariano’s series attempt to draft a map of a world in its fraying inexactitude of wavering memory, grasping at the edges of the past and what could’ve-beens. It’s a liquid empire diluted with each reimagining.

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