Singapore Art Week 2022
State of the Arts:
Artist Interviews
As part of Singapore Art Week 2022 (SAW), held from 14 to 23 January 2022, The Institutum presents the continuation of our State of the Arts series.
Amanda Heng
Cultural Medallion recipient and multi-disciplinary artist Amanda Heng pioneered feminist discourse in the local arts scene. Her practice is process focused and the audience is invited to participate in the process to explore social and gender identities. Here she speaks to Tan Boon Hui about enrolling at Lasalle in her 30’s during the 1980’s, how art became her language in finding meaning in life in parallel with the early years of post-independence Singapore, and the evolution of her practice.
Amanda Heng (b. 1951, Singapore) has been a full-time art practitioner since the late 1980s. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach to her art practice, she deals with clashing of eastern and western values, traditions and gender roles in the context of a multi-cultural and fast-changing society of Singapore. Recently she expended her study in identity politics addressing issues of history, memory, communication and human relationships in urban condition and the changes and its impact on the body and life. She often works in collaboration with people of different cultural backgrounds from art as well as non-art fields, and led her to closer examination of the roles of the audience and collaboration practices.
Chen Yanyun
In this episode of State of the Arts, Tan Boon Hui speaks to Chen Yanyun. From her formal training in Animation, Classical Realism and Philosophy, to her dual career as both artist and academic; Yanyun speaks of how “questions” and “questioning” have propelled her practice and approach to art. From the necessity of changing methods due to a shortage of her preferred charcoal to the meaning of space, Yanyun shares her journey with us.
Dr. Yanyun Chen (b. 1986, Singapore) is a visual artist, known for her charcoal drawings, animations and installations practice, and her works delve into the aesthetic, cultural and technological inheritances on one’s body, unravelling fictional and philosophical notions of embodiment. She researches cultural wounds, dowry traditions, hereditary scars, philosophies of nudities, and etymology. Chen graduated from the European Graduate School Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought PhD programme in 2018, the Communications MA programme in 2014, and Nanyang Technological University School of Art Design and Media Digital Animation programme in 2009. She is the Arts Practice Coordinator for the Humanities division of Yale-NUS College in Singapore.
Robert Zhao
Singaporean artist Robert Zhao’s artistic practice investigates man’s relationship with nature, through narratives in print, film and photography. Robert speaks to Tan Boon Hui about the evolution and philosophy of his practice. From his time as a photography major at Polytechnic to the work he made from his 26th floor window during Singapore's pandemic lock down.
Robert Zhao (b. 1982) is a multi-disciplinary artist who blends reality and fiction in his works. Strongly informed by his observations and ongoing research into the natural world, Zhao adopts a practice that investigates and unravels the intertwining relationship between humans and their habitats.
anGie seah
Filmed at the Aliwal Arts Centre, amidst a backdrop of anGie’s works, Tan Booh Hui speaks with multi-disciplinary artist anGie seah. Formally trained in Sculpture, anGie’s practice has grown to encompass drawing, performance art, sound and video. She firmly believes that audience experience is integral to her practice and that they should be able to “perform with her” and socially engaged art is a cornerstone of her practice. In this interview we explore how Art for anGie expresses the condition of being alive.
Born in 1979, anGie seah is a Singaporean artist. Her multidisciplinary practice traverses the mediums of drawing, sculpture, performance art, sound and video to respond about the enigma of life. In 2000, she was awarded an education bursary from National Arts Council, graduating from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Bachelor of Arts, with a major in sculpture. She was also awarded a culture scholarship from the Goethe Institute, Berlin in 2005.
Pio Abad
This interview between artist Pio Abad and art historian Sandhini Poddar mines Abad’s longstanding research on the troubled legacy of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, and the implications of their corruption and greed on present-day Filipino society. Abad’s personal history is entwined with larger political discourses around the archive, history, and transnationalism. As he states, “as much as it’s a visual arts project, it’s a political project.” We learn about the Marcos’ close friendship with Nancy and Ronald Reagan, and the self-mythologizing tendency of both political families. In excavating this otherwise private world, Abad monumentalizes what would otherwise be lost to history.
Abad’s role within the Pacita Abad Art Estate is another aspect of his expanded studio practice, as he disseminates the work of his late aunt through an “ethics of inheritance”.
As a whole, we come to reckon with Abad’s practice as an intricate mapping of the world through a complex and interrelated praxis involving drawing, 3D printing, painting, and sculpture.
Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila) is a Filipino artist living and working in London. His work is concerned with the social and political signification of things. Deeply informed by the modern history of the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work uses strategies of appropriation to mine alternative or repressed historical events, unravel official accounts and draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people.