True Fiction
Rin
Projected Introspection
Rin
1987 -
Rin was a portrait photographer active in Singapore during the early 2000’s. She lived and worked in a cavernous loft studio—a controlled, self-contained world where time moved differently. There are no known interviews, no public statements, and only limited documentation of her exhibitions. What remains is the work itself: a series of portraits that feel more like constructions than captures.
Though she photographed real people, the resulting images often seemed to drift away from them. Her subjects appear stylized, symbolic, caught in a space between reality and representation. Some described the process as collaborative. Others felt like they’d been transformed into someone they didn’t recognize.
Rin’s method was slow and deliberate. She often photographed her sitters multiple times, rarely showing them the images in progress. Props would appear—sometimes meaningful, sometimes inscrutable. Settings were minimal. What mattered happened later, in post-production, alone in the studio. The final images emerged through layering and intuition, shaped as much by Rin’s own emotional state as by the presence of her subjects.
In this way, her portraits function less as records and more as projections. They do not attempt to reveal a sitter’s essence. Instead, they suggest a convergence: what Rin saw, what she felt, what she needed to express.
She left no titles. She offered no explanations. But across her body of work, one pattern emerges: each portrait becomes a kind of mirror. Not of the sitter, necessarily—but of Rin herself. Or who she believed they could be.
She didn’t vanish. She simply stopped.
And the work, in its silence, continues to speak.