THE LOCAL MOTION
A look at 12 leading artists and rising stars who have shaped the local art scene. By Gillian Daniel
SCULPTOR HAN SAI POR
One of Singapore’s leading modern sculptors and the 1995 recipient of the Cultural Medallion in Art, Han Sai Por is best known for her organic sculptures rendered primarily in granite and marble, created from monoblock pieces of stone. Han’s understated sculptures have a meditative quietness through which she explores the fraught relationship between man and nature. Studies in elementary forms, her monoliths explore ideas of presence and simplicity, and examine the fundamental characteristics of sculpture by emphasising mass, materiality and tactility. Her sculptures can be found in numerous public and corporate spaces in Singapore including the Esplanade and Changi Airport. In the context of these busy city spaces, Han’s unassuming organic works encourage viewers to ponder the delicate balance between the natural and the urban, reasserting that man is very much a part of nature and not apart from it. Visit www. hansaipor.com
INSTALLATION ARTIST STEPHANIE JANE BURT
Exploring themes of feminism, motherdaughter relationships, and female friendships in her works, Stephanie Jane Burt’s practice is inspired by feminist texts, and literary and cinematic interpretations of these texts. With an acute sensitivity to materials, her installations probe themes of vulnerability and instability through the visual and material language of the feminine and the domestic. At first glance, her constructions have an attractive quality, thanks to the use of delicate materials like lace and fabric. A closer inspection, however, reveals a sinister element of threat that comes through as a result of the frailty of her materials and how they are flimsily tied together. Her structures recall the fragile female protagonists in the texts she is inspired by, who are often plagued by internal turmoil. Burt is also the co-founder of Bubble Gum & Death Metal (BGDM), a feminist platform intended to build relationships between female creatives. Visit www.stephaniejburt.co.uk
VIDEO/ PERFORMANCE ARTIST HO TZU NYEN
Worki n g primarily with the mediums of film, video, installation and performance, Ho Tzu Nyen is interested in exploring neglected histories. He unearths forgotten strands of folkloric history that have been obscured by official narratives. His film, The Nameless, tells the story of Lai Teck, one of the 50 known aliases of the secretary general of the Malayan Communist Party from 1939 to 1947, who served as a triple agent for the French, British and Japanese. Piecing together footage from films starring Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who has often portrayed the role of Lai Teck in his movies, Ho paints a fragmentary portrait of the mysterious agent. Initially commissioned for the 2014 Shanghai Biennale but delayed by Chinese censorship, The Nameless was eventually presented at Art Basel Unlimited in 2016 by STPI—one of 88 to nab a coveted spot out of over 200 submissions—with Ho becoming the first Singaporean artist to show at the prestigious fair.
PAINTER FYEROOL DARMA
Fyerool Darma explores the liminal spaces between history and mythology by working with alternative narratives and oral histories. Driven by his concern about a growing historical amnesia, threads of violence and iconoclasm often underpin his work. In the “Moyang” series, which features portraits of colonial subjects and landscapes from the colonies in the Spice Islands, frames are blackened to look charred. Some are sawn in half, while some portrait subjects have their features obscured by black paint to look redacted. Through the series, Darma poses challenging questions about how we have come to understand Singapore’s past. He brings to light the often glossed-over Malay history of Singapore, attempting to bridge gaps in collective memory about the narratives that have shaped our past. Visit www.fyerooldarma.com
VIDEO/PERFORMANCE ARTIST MING WONG
The chameleonic Ming Wong impersonates the heroes of the global cinematic canon in his witty and irreverent video works. Through his signature method of what he calls “impostoring”, Wong explores the many facets of identity, performing roles from celebrated films that conspicuously do not correspond to his designation as an Asian man. In works such as Me in Me (2013), Wong explores the familiar tropes of Japanese cinema, embracing and even exaggerating misalignments in gender, language and ethnicity to tell the stories of three Japanese women from different eras. Accompanying the trailers is documentary footage of the artist’s process in becoming these characters. What is highlighted is the dissonances in becoming, as Wong’s gender miscasting, fumbled attempts at physical compensation and speech errors encourage viewers to interrogate how identities and stereotypes are created and enforced. At the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Wong became the first Singaporean artist to be awarded a Special Mention for his work Life of Imitation at the Singapore Pavilion. Visit www.mingwong.org
PAINTER JANE LEE
Jane Lee first came under critical spotlight in 2008, when her work Raw Canvas was featured in the Singapore Biennale curated by Fumio Nanjo. Her works examine the medium of painting itself, interrogating the elemental components of a painting, including the stretcher, the canvas and the paint itself. With each work, she pushes the limits of the materials and techniques of painting. The result is that her works are sensuously tactile, blurring the line between the two-dimensional and the threedimensional, between painting and sculpture, between action and inaction. Her innovative paintings encourage viewers to reflect on the medium’s continued significance and relevance in the field of contemporary art today, where artists are constantly experimenting with new techniques and mediums. Visit www.janelee.sg