To round up 12’s exhibition calendar in 2008, co-curators Roopesh Sitharan and Shooshie Sulaiman transformed 12 into an experimental vault with the found photographs of Puah Chin Kok.

Puah’s found images were uncollected prints from his old photo studio – along with many sourced from friends in the industry - and these seemingly mundane images took on new dimensions with the floor-to-ceiling display on the entire ground floor of 12.

Numbering over 10,000 pieces, the images ran the gamut from building sites to individuals, birthday parties to a game of musical chairs, and official passport photographs to weddings.

Upstairs, however, 12’s walls were noticeable stark. Focus, instead, was on nine images in kitsch, gilded frames. Again, these images presented themselves as seemingly innocuous photographs of a joint family vacation, but discovering that they served as the very documents in a pivotal judicial case of 2008 (these images were snapshots of the now-legendary joint family vacation of Mohd Eusoff Chin and VK Lingam to New Zealand in 1994) probed audiences to ask themselves the question: what are photographs - documents, art, or both?