June 25, 2007 the monday interview
Colour of money
He may be colour blind, but that didn't stop Singaporean John Clang from becoming a rich and successful photographer in New York. In fact, it helped.
By Michelle Tay
SINGAPOREAN photographer John Clang has a birth defect that is also his gift - he is colour blind.
He can't tell red from green, yet regularly produces photos of such uncommon beauty that they have propelled him to New York where he makes US$700,000 (S$1.08 million) to US$2.4 million a year taking pictures for clients like Godiva, Nike, IBM and Levi's.
His colour prints have a muted, slightly antique mood where the wash can sometimes look too blue or too magenta, and there is not much contrast between light and dark colours.
But it was this trait which caught the attention of the New York fashion scene when he moved there in 1999.
'Everyone liked my colour prints because they looked different, but I couldn't let anyone know I was colour blind,' he reveals at an interview at Royal Copenhagen Tea Lounge in Takashimaya last Thursday.
He adds: 'I didn't want them to feel stupid because they kept saying they liked my colour, while I didn't even know what colour it was.'
The 34-year-old Bedok-born boy is arguably Singapore's hottest photographic export ever. But lest you think his success is accidental, Clang will have you know that colour per se does not make or break a picture.
'I use colour to evoke a mood that is basically very calm and it feels good. The tonality of my prints is always very accurate. That's why I'm extremely good with black and white pictures, which I did a lot of in my early days.'
Another hallmark is his fetish for capturing a person's back on film. 'It's like I'm a voyeur, looking at them without them knowing I'm looking,' says Clang, adding that, as a child, he tailed attractive girls home just to gain a peek into their daily lives as he was too shy to talk to them.
Simply put, his images are often simple, sometimes awkward and, like his series of transposed images currently on show at The Substation, make one pause and stare in wonderment.
It comes as no surprise then that he is represented by Art and Commerce - the dream agency for all photographers, he says - which also represents big names like Annie Leibowitz and Steven Meisel.
Says Theseus Chan, 45, founder of Work Advertising and Clang's collaborator on Werk, a fashion and graphic design magazine: 'What came through from the beginning was John's uncompromising quality and vision. His success is a by-product of his talent and unyielding character, which are a lot more appreciated in a place like New York.'
Boy from Bedok
CLANG is a classic rags-to-riches story.
Raised in an HDB flat in Bedok, he now owns three apartments in downtown Manhattan, totalling US$3.2 million.
The Soho loft in which he lives screams minimalist chic. His soon-to-be upstairs neighbour is American hip-hop superstar Kanye West.
So influential is Clang in the New York fashion and design scene that when West asked for advice on how to furnish his new apartment, their landlord reportedly recommended that West check out Clang's classy pad. Clang ordered him to sack his interior designer and hire one from London. And West did just that.
But for all his high-living lifestyle, in person Clang is a down-to-earth guy, hardly the reticent or eccentric diva some have made him out to be.
Dressed in a nondescript grey T-shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, the 'New Yorker' looks more like he belongs in the gritty Bowery than on posh Madison Avenue.
Throughout the three-hour interview, he is easy-going, gentlemanly, flirtatious and forthcoming with stories.
With a still-distinct Singaporean accent, he tells you with childlike delight that he relies on his wife Elin so much that he never travels anywhere without her, lets her hold the purse strings and that he does not even know how to write a cheque.
He says 'bless you' when you sneeze, compliments you on your 'nice shoulders' and readily reveals that he takes on seven or eight commercial projects a year, earning US$100,000 to US$300,000 for each.
But one thing is for sure: He is cocky. He is not afraid to tell you how good he is at his craft and boasts that he once walked out on an editor of a Singapore arm of a foreign magazine because she disapproved of him shooting for a local fashion title.
He also takes credit for finding a wife for a close friend. In 2002, he photographed a pal, known as Beon, for Chinese fashion magazine Nu You.
'Beon is short, ugly and works as a cobbler,' says Clang, who hired Singaporean model Jessie Leong to pose opposite Beon as his girlfriend, making him look like 'a sexy stud'.
'I projected my own sexiness onto him, and showed how even an ugly man can be charming and make women want him. Not only has he since found a girlfriend, he also just got married last week to a Taiwanese university lecturer.'
Clang was born Ang Choon Leng. His father serves food at a hawker centre and his mother, now retired, worked in a restaurant as a waitress. His brother Joe, 32, is a primary school teacher. He got his moniker while serving national service, where his name badge read C L Ang.
People started to call him Clang and it stuck. It 'sounds German', he admits, and helped get him noticed in his early days in the Big Apple.
He knew he wanted to be a photographer when he was 15 and an above-average student in Anglican High School.
At 17, he enrolled in a fine art and photography course at Lasalle College of the Arts. To pay the monthly $350 fee, he worked as an odd-job assistant at a wedding studio.
'Sometimes, I would go without lunch for days. I saved the money to take my girlfriend out.'
Today, she is his wife. He met Elin, 34, when they were both in Anglican High and they married when they were 23. She works as his full-time print producer and they have no children.
Clang stayed only six months at Lasalle as he found it slow-going. He became a photographic assistant for Chua Soo Bin, a fine-art photographer who now owns an art gallery featuring contemporary Chinese artists. Later, he joined Willie Tang, whom he calls 'the most famous Singaporean photographer before me', at The Picture Farm.
In 1994, he set up his first studio, John Clang's Place, in King George's Avenue near Lavender Street and furnished it with furniture that people had discarded. He worked with a $2,000 second-hand Toyo 4.5 camera and a low-powered $200 Bowen 200D light.
His first break was a commercial shoot for Singapore Airlines and, after that, jobs poured in from fashion magazines and commercial clients.
But Clang, being embarrassed of his minimal resources, was reluctant to let anyone see his set: 'I had to mark the floor with lots of masking tape and shift the light around, double-exposing the film. If they still insisted on seeing the set, I would open all the windows to let the light in and say, 'This shoot doesn't require any additional light, we'll use the sunlight'.'
He admits that he wanted people to think he was wealthy: 'I did not come from a rich family. That was my insecurity and why I had to build a facade. When I made my first pile at 23, I rented a condo in Paterson Road in the heart of town. I wanted to be a part of that elite society and understand what it felt like to live rich, even though I was not.'
In building the impression that he was 'a great artist who needed to work alone in his space', he also gained a reputation for being a prima donna. And that, in the world of fashion and celebrity, makes one even more sought after.
As he puts it: 'I was the hot new young photographer who wouldn't let anyone near my studio.'
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