Jose Jeuland | Aging Singapore

Jose Jeuland | Aging Singapore | A Photography Exhibition

“From performing opera to going on religious pilgrimages, I was fortunate to have been able to listen to all of their fascinating stories.” – Jose Jeuland

“On 14 November 2022, I held the VIP launch event for Aging Singapore, my photography exhibition featuring elderly individuals in Singapore.
Esteemed guests, including exhibition sponsors, partners, and industry professionals, were gathered at the Fullerton Hotel Singapore for the event. While some were admiring the portraits on display, others were spraying and smelling the various fragrances placed next to each portrait or scanning the QR codes on the caption boards to listen to accompanying audio recordings for each portrait. For example, a portrait of a woman who loves hiking is complemented by a fresh, woody fragrance and the sounds of someone walking on a leafy forest trail.
I have done a few photography exhibitions in my career as a professional photographer, but this is the first time I am doing a multi-sensorial photography exhibition, and I am very excited to share more about it with the Singaporean masses.
The allure of the Aged I’ve done two previous exhibitions at the Fullerton Hotel: Haenyeo and Longevity Okinawa. Both of these exhibitions featured a lineup of elderly people, and now for Aging Singapore, the main focus is, once again, on senior citizens. Many people think that I specialize in portraiture for elderly folk, but it is, believe it or not, an unplanned coincidence that all three of my exhibitions feature the elderly.

The first exhibition, Haenyeo

Haenyeo focused on depicting and raising awareness about the women divers of Jeju Island, South Korea. Many are in their senior years, some still diving, even in their 80s. I flew to Jeju to photograph them on their morning dives, and I was awe-struck by their grit and determination, even in the later years of their lives.
Diving deep for seafood can be physically demanding and dangerous, often requiring huge amounts of mental strength to take the first step. So watching these elderly women jump in without hesitation was very inspiring to me. It gave me a fresh perspective on aging and how growing old does not necessarily have to be dull or boring. Enraptured by the Haenyeo’s resilience, I returned to Singapore to hold an exhibition to share their story.

My second exhibition, Longevity Okinawa

Shortly after, I traveled to Okinawa, a Japanese island, to photograph the centenarians living there. Okinawa is famous for its elderly residents, who are known to live very, very long lives. The elderly people I photographed at the time ranged from 80 to 100 years old. I interviewed them to uncover their secrets to longevity. Many had similar answers: maintaining a healthy lifestyle, investing time and energy into a passion or hobby to pass the time meaningfully, and regularly socializing with friends and family.
I found the information relevant and essential to many people, since aging is an irreversible and inevitable process that everyone will experience. And since we cannot reverse time when faced with regrets, young people should be privy to the centenarians’ secrets at an earlier age so that they can start working towards a healthy and long life. I thus returned to Singapore and held my second exhibition at the Fullerton Hotel, Longevity Okinawa.
These past exhibitions have added to my photography experience and taught me many things about the concept of growing old. Perhaps it was because of the impactful trips I made to Jeju and Okinawa that I was subconsciously drawn to the idea of Aging Singapore as an exhibition concept.

Why Aging Singapore?

After living in Singapore for seven years, I consider this place home, and I want my next exhibition to pay homage to the nation. I thought long and hard about a current and relevant topic to Singapore, and our aging population was my pick.
An increasingly aging population is something that Singapore, among other nations, is experiencing. Many young people are concerned about this phenomenon and the financial strain the government and the working population would have to fight against.
This is, of course, hardly the case. Many elderly people in Singapore are still working and intend to continue as long as possible. Many also have a wide variety of hobbies and interests that they actively participate in, and they keep up an exercise routine to maintain a healthy life even after retirement. These seniors strive to live in productive and meaningful ways, even in their twilight years, and their vigor and passion are truly admirable.

Through photographing and interviewing seniors in Singapore, I wanted my exhibition to become a platform to help share their stories of hard work and determination and inspire local youths to be active members of their communities and stay healthy from a young age. Furthermore, by making their stories better known to the Singaporean masses, I also hope the exhibition can enable young people to revisit their impressions of the elderly and debunk some negative stereotypes people have about them.
To further draw people in, I wanted to do something different from my previous exhibitions. I realized from my past travels that my most memorable experiences were unforgettable because I was there in the flesh, seeing, hearing, and smelling everything around me. That’s when I realized: the key to a fully immersive experience is through the stimulation of multiple senses at once.
Although I am a professional photographer and understand the power of a single, silent image, I strongly felt that including different senses in the viewing experience could elevate it to unprecedented levels.
I thus got the idea to incorporate fragrances and audio into my next photography exhibition to ensure that visitors could get a viewing experience like no other. I also planned to contribute financially to a charity that assists Singapore’s silver generation by selling prints, posters, and postcard sets at the exhibition.

Documenting Memories

My team and I are also currently working on producing a documentary film about not only the exhibition itself, but the phenomenon of an aging population in general and the thoughts and feelings of local elderly folks who are a part of it.
The documentary will include interview footage from all 12 photographed subjects talking about their lives, memories, and how they spend their time as seniors. There will also be exclusive footage of me discussing my experience interacting with these seniors, my thoughts about the aging population, and the stigma surrounding aging.
The aim of this documentary aligns with the exhibition’s mission, which is to destigmatize aging and foster more respect and admiration for the nation’s silver generation. It will be released on YouTube sometime next month, and I sincerely hope that it will be able to touch the hearts of more youths, perhaps even across Singapore’s borders.

In the Making

The first step of planning the documentary and exhibition was finding partners and collaborators that could help to make it a smashing success!
I first needed to look for a partner willing to create the olfactory stimuli for the exhibition, and a senior charity to collaborate with.

Symrise

As a longstanding client of mine, fragrance and flavor house Symrise was very willing to collaborate with me on this project and create different fragrances for each of my subjects. With their help, we discussed and suggested ideas and fragrance notes for each subject after I photographed and interviewed them. In the end, fragrances of many different types were inspired by various facets of each subject. Some of them were based on the environments the subjects loved to frequent, some were based on their heritage and culture, and some were based on their personalities.
Symrise came through with their final products; each scent was sophisticated and layered, adding depth to the portraits and enhancing their impact on the viewer.

Lions Befrienders

Another significant collaborator I managed to seek out was Lions Befrienders, a local social organization that aims to help seniors in Singapore live happy and healthy lives. They organize social events and light exercises to unite seniors and enable them to positively influence each other’s lives.
Through Lions Befrienders, I got many contacts of seniors with exciting lives and hobbies. I photographed many of them, some of whom ended up on the twelve portraits displayed at the exhibition!
Lions Befrienders was also very gracious in allowing us to document moments of their many seniors partaking in their organized activities, such as Chair Zumba. I am very grateful for their help in preparing for the exhibition. Their hard work in ensuring that seniors are living out their twilight years fruitfully is an endeavor that I fully support from the bottom of my heart. In fact, 20% of all profits made from exhibition sales (in the form of prints, posters, and postcard sets) will go to Lions Befrienders. So I hope that with a little bit of financial help, my exhibition will directly benefit Singaporean seniors and better their quality of life.

Behind the Scenes

I had a lot of fun interacting with the many seniors I interviewed for the exhibition. It was fascinating to learn about the different elderly folk in Singapore because each and every one of them has such rich and unique stories to share. From performing opera to going on religious pilgrimages, I was fortunate to have been able to listen to all of these fascinating stories. In addition, they were all very welcoming to my team and me when we visited them for their photography sessions ,and were eager to converse with us.
Their stories were so diverse that my team and I had a lot of fun experimenting with the audio clips for them. Based on the many things that we were told, there were countless combinations and concepts that we could choose from when curating the audio files. We decided to let each file tell its own story, hoping they could help paint a deeper and more vibrant picture of a day in the life of these seniors. Visitors are more than welcome to interpret the audio clips as they wish.

The Fruits of Our Labour

It was undoubtedly a long and eventful few months of planning, shooting, and editing for my team at COCO Creative Studio. On top of preparing for Aging Singapore, we also had to keep up with our usual commercial workload and deliver quality work on time to our clients.
From acquiring sponsors to recording scenes for the Aging Singapore documentary, my team and I worked tirelessly to bring the exhibition to life. And when it was finally open to the public on 14 November 2022, I was filled with a sense of pride and accomplishment. It has not been easy putting this exhibition together, but after seeing everything come together on the day of the launch, I truly felt that every effort was worth it.
In the first week of the exhibition, I also invited the seniors to come down to the Fullerton Hotel Singapore to check out their portraits. Knowing they were satisfied and impressed by the large prints was heartwarming. Many of them were also happy to meet the other subjects, even going as far as exchanging phone numbers to keep in touch. Watching them mingle and socialize at the exhibition venue was a dream come true—this was the first time the subjects of my photographs could come to my exhibition, and it was surreal!
I could tell that the seniors were proud to be a part of the exhibition, and the smiles on their faces made this all the more worth it for me. I hope to help more seniors feel this pride and satisfaction by seeing their own faces on a large canvas.
I would like to thank our exhibition partners, Symrise and Lions Befrienders, for their continued support.
Many thanks as well to our other sponsors, Brilliant Prints, BenQ, and Vinomofo, for their products and financial assistance. And last but definitely not least, I am eternally grateful for the hard work of my team at COCO Creative Studio, as well as COCO PR Agency, for promoting the exhibition through press releases and obtaining media interviews for us.
It takes a village, and I am humbled and grateful for everyone’s help in putting this exhibition together. Only with the support of many could have had the opportunity and privilege to hold an exhibition of this scale yet again. I hope the exhibition will change some young Singaporeans’ minds and inspire them to learn from their respectable elders.

See the full article in Lens Magazine Issue #98