Low Yu Neng (Lyn)

This qualitative, practitioner-based thesis set out to explore how photography, as a primary art therapy modality, can support symbolic expression, self-perception and relational meaning-making within a palliative care context.

Rooted in a single-case study, this research explored how photographic processes help facilitate the externalisation of internal experience, the negotiation of identity, emergence of alternative self-narratives and affect expression for an older male adult living with life-limiting illness.

The study considered how photography functioned both as a therapeutic intervention and as a means of accessing and understanding the participant’s inner world within a relational art therapy framework.

Good Night is an installation that emerges from a tension between witnessing and turning away. In my work as an art therapist trainee in the hospice/end-of-life setting, I am present with patients in moments of suffering, awaiting death. This kind of witnessing is slow and exacting. It calls for unconditional positive regard and sustained presence to hold space as life narrows, and to honour the pain that is both spoken and unspoken. In this context, I am close to death, I see its face, and I stay.

Running in parallel, I encounter global violence, injustice and deaths through the news and social media. These events unfold briefly before my eyes, vast in scale yet distant, then slip away with a gesture as small as a swipe. In these moments, I feel caught between staying and turning away, as I am aware that my attention and presence do not change the outcome. The stark contrast between my responses creates tension and discomfort within me.

This installation gives form to this incongruence. It translates the tension between sustained presence and effortless disengagement into a space where attention, distance and duration become felt rather than explained.

This work does not offer resolution or instruction. Instead, it invites the viewers to consider how they position themselves—to pass through, to turn away or to stay, and what it means to linger with what cannot be acted upon.