past Exhibitions

Moderated by Khim Ong, Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes, NTU CCA Singapore

Artist Saeko Ando will discuss with Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material participating artist Phi Phi Oanh the way in which traditional Vietnamese lacquer has been innovatively adapted in contemporary art.  

BIOGRAPHIES

Saeko Ando (Japan/Vietnam) studied Japanese art and philosophy at Waseda University in Tokyo. In 1995, she moved to Vietnam to learn lacquer art under the tutelage of Trinh Tuan, Doan Chi Trung, Nguyen Huy Hoan, and Lam Huu Chinh. Her practice integrates the traditional with the contemporary through an innovative use of Vietnamese lacquer techniques. Ando’s eccentric style earned the respect of Vietnam’s art society, and she was the first foreign member to be invited to the Hanoi Art Association in 2000. She has exhibited extensively in Vietnam and internationally, and regularly presents her research on lacquer arts from Vietnam, Taiwan, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Japan in conventions and symposiums.

Phi Phi Oanh’s (United States/Vietnam) work is informed by her inquiry into lacquer as a material combined with her studies of the Vietnamese lacquer painting (sơn mài) tradition. Drawing from the hybrid nature of her personal history, Oanh constructs pictorial and evocative installations that reconfigure culturally-specific signs and symbols, creating familiar yet distinctive experiential spaces. In 2004 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study traditional Tranh Sơn Mài (Vietnamese lacquer painting) in Hanoi, which has since become a key medium in her practice. She has had solo exhibitions at L’Espace, Alliance Française in Hanoi; Artcore in Los Angeles; Art League in Houston; as well as El Palacio Nacional de la Cultura in Managua. In 2016, she was commissioned to create Pro Se, a work for the National Gallery Singapore and also showed her monumental Specula in the Singapore Biennale (2013).

Khim Ong is Deputy Director, Curatorial Programmes at NTU CCA Singapore. She previously worked as an independent curator and held curatorial positions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE, and Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. Ong was Manager, Sector Development (Visual Arts) at the National Arts Council during which she contributed to conceptualising NTU CCA Singapore. Selected exhibitions co-curated for the Centre include Ghosts and Spectres – Shadows of History (2017), Incomplete Urbanism: Attempts of Critical Spatial Practice (2016), and Amar Kanwar: The Sovereign Forest (2016). Selected curatorial projects include Re|Collecting Asia (2017), the Southeast Asia Platform, Art Stage Singapore (2015), and Landscape Memories, Louis Vuitton Espace, Singapore (2013).

Image credit (from left to right): Phi Phi Oanh, Palimpsest slide #43 and Palimpsest slide #25, both 2014. Courtesy Diego Cortizas del Valle.

A climbing palm of tropical Southeast Asia, rattan has supplied material over the centuries for everyday objects and artworks. What is the surface made of? What are the unique characteristics of rattan? Examining laboratory analysis from electron microscopy, confocal laser scanning, and stereo-microscopy, this lecture focuses on rattan’s lustrous surface and material stability. 

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Hanna M. Szczepanowska (United States/Singapore), Senior Conservation Scientist, is currently setting up the Research Laboratory and Programme for National Heritage Board in Singapore. She obtained a PhD in material science from the University of Lyon, France, and a Masters Degree in paper and parchment conservation from the University of Nicolaus Copernicus, Torun, Poland. Prior to moving to Singapore, she worked for over ten years at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, United States, taught at George Washington University, Washington DC, and served as a consultant in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia. She received two Fulbright Scholarships to Malta and Egypt, advising the government in both countries on cultural heritage.

Image credit: Courtesy Hanna Szczepanowska.

Moderated by Laura Miotto (Italy/Singapore), Associate Professor and Co-director, MA Museum Studies and Curatorial Practices, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University (NTU ADM)

Dedicated to spatial and furniture design, this panel brings together designers and manufacturers who use traditional weaving techniques guided by an environmental consciousness. These specialists are also at the forefront of innovating the traditional uses of rattan on an international scale.  

BIOGRAPHIES

Paola Bellani (Italy) is the Deputy Editor and Founder of disegno, a biannual paper magazine dedicated to design culture. Her interest focuses on design communication and contemporary design culture. She has worked extensively as a consultant on brand communication and creative direction. Among her clients are Yamakawa, a Japanese company specialising in hand-woven rattan furniture; and Fritz Hansen, the historical Danish furniture brand. Bellani is also an educator and currently teaches Culture of Project at NABA University in Milano.

P.C. Ee (Singapore) is Co-founder of the Singapore-based furniture brand Industry+ that constantly works with designers and manufacturers to produce and promote Asian design products for the international market. P.C. Ee edits and produces works of Asian designers including Jun Yasumoto, Studio Juju, and Nendo, in a collaborative process for the brand’s collection. Industry+ also creates a collection of outdoor furniture for WOHA’s new brand WOHAbeing. Industry+ strives to push the boundaries of materials, manufacturing, and craftsmanship in Asia, producing pieces that carry traces of influence from the culture of its designers to collectively represent a subconscious Asian aesthetic.

Lim Masulin (Indonesia) is “ASEAN Senior Mastercraft Designer” known to invent the BYO Living weaving technology for energy saving architecture like Toyota Headquarter’s 4,000m² LEED Platinum ventilation weaving panels, East Java power plant’s cooling façade, ad Maldives Halaveli’s outdoor furniture. On sustainable materials, he uncovers regrow-able rattan with durable silica skin, tear-proof grass from CO2 absorbing peatland, and weatherproof upcycle waste. At the World Economic Forum, he shared how to make a social impact with weaving’s circular sustainability. You can visit his latest work on Indonesian architect Andra Matin’s pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which received a Special Mention Award for reflecting on material/form of traditional vernacular structures.

Laura Miotto (Italy/Singapore) is Associate Professor at NTU ADM and Design Director of GSM Project in Singapore. With 15 years of experience in the design field, both as a creative director and an architectural designer, Miotto has worked on permanent and temporary exhibitions, focusing on heritage interpretation and sensorial design strategies in the context of museums, thematic galleries, and public spaces. Among her projects are the new Sarawak Museum in Kuching and the Living Galleries at the National Museum of Singapore that explore local cultures in a phase of transformation. In 2010 she received the President Design Award for the exhibition Quest for Immortality: The World of Ancient Egypt.

Image credit: Tokyo Tribal Collection 15. Photo by Akihiro Yoshida. Courtesy Industry+.

With over 600 species, rattan is astonishingly diverse with its main centre of distribution in Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago. Uses of the plants range from medicine to cigarette papers, from basket weaving to cane furniture. Leading rattan expert Dr John Dransfield will talk about unsustainable harvesting, the expansion of the oil-palm industry, the possibilities of smallholder cultivation, and what it means for the future of rattan furniture and the handicraft industries.  

BIOGRAPHY

Dr John Dransfield (United Kingdom) graduated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, gaining his PhD under Professor E.J.H. Corner in 1970 with a study of two Malaysian palm genera, Eugeissona and Johannesteijsmannia. He devoted his working life to palm research, working first in Indonesia for four years specialising in rattan, the climbing palms that are the source of cane for cane furniture. In 1975 he continued palm research at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew where he was head of Palm Research until his retirement in 2005. Dransfield is Honorary Research Fellow at Kew and author of several books on palms (including rattan) and numerous scientific papers.

Image credit: Courtesy John Dransfield. 

Sopheap Pich, whose work is among those featured in Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material, started working with natural materials, such as bamboo, rattan, burlap, beeswax, and earth pigments, in the early 2000s to create sculptural objects informed by themes of time, memory, and the body. This conversation with Ute Meta Bauer gives insight into his creative process and his long-term engagement with natural materials and local craftsmen.

BIOGRAPHIES

Sopheap Pich (Cambodia) left Cambodia with his family as a refugee at the end of the Khmer Rouge’s reign, settling in the United States in 1984. Memories of his childhood and a desire to reconnect with his home country drew the artist back to Cambodia in 2002. Pich holds a BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1995), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999). His work was presented at NTU CCA Singapore as part of Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative’s No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia (2014), curated by Dr June Yap. In 2013, Pich held a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, entitled Cambodian Rattan: The Sculptures of Sopheap Pich. Selected group exhibitions include the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); the Moscow Biennale (2013); Documenta 13, Kassel (2012); the Singapore Biennial (2011), among others. 

Ute Meta Bauer (Germany/Singapore) is Founding Director, NTU CCA Singapore, and Professor, NTU ADM. She was formerly Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States, where she also served as Founding Director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology. For more than three decades, Bauer has worked as curator of exhibitions and presentations, connecting contemporary art, film, video, and sound through transdisciplinary formats. She publishes regularly on artistic and curatorial practice. Bauer served as expedition leader of TBA21–Academy The Current 2015–17 exploring the Pacific Archipelago and littorals that are most impacted by climate change and human interventions in their environments.

Image credit: Sopheap Pich, Delta, 2007, rattan, wire, 478 x 341 x 70 cm. Courtesy the artist.

With a focus on Southeast Asia, this discussion will unveil the richness of traditional fabric making and dyeing through the lens of textile expert Lee Chor Lin, who will present a comprehensive overview of the region; anthropologist Geneviève Duggan, who has dedicated 30 years to researching textile traditions in Savu, Indonesia; and textile artist and weaver Lynelle Barrett, who will demonstrate how dyes applied to yarns are used in ikat weaving and other traditional weaving techniques.

BIOGRAPHIES

Dr Geneviève Duggan (France/Singapore) is an anthropologist and during three decades of research in Indonesia, she has studied textile traditions in social contexts (Ikats of Savu White Lotus 2001) and transmission of knowledge in an oral society (PhD thesis, NUS 2008). From 2010 to 2013 she was a Visiting Fellow at ISEAS (Singapore). Recent publications include Savu; history and oral tradition in an island of Indonesia (co-authored with Hans Hägerdal NUS Press, 2018); A note about hand-woven cloths with a continuous warp in eastern Indonesia (Archipel, 2017); and Tracing Ancient Networks; Linguistics, Hand-woven Cloths and Looms in Eastern Indonesia (Qin Dashu and Yuan Jian eds, World Scientific, 2015).

Lynelle Barrett (United States/Singapore) is a textile artist and weaver. Since moving to Singapore in 2013, she has been immersed in learning about processes, culture, and history of the region’s traditional textiles, researching traditional weaving and natural dye techniques from Indigenous weavers. Currently, she is Co-coordinator of the Friends of the Museums Textile Enthusiasts Group. Barrett studied Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design, New York and was a lecturer in the Diploma in Fashion Progamme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She has conserved costumes and prepared them for exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Leuven. She has also worked as a web editor and freelance journalist, and her volunteer work is often focused on empowering women.

Lee Chor Lin (Singapore) is known for her expertise on the textiles of Southeast Asia. She is the author of Ancestral Ships: Fabric Impressions of Old Lampung Culture (1987). She has also contributed essays on Southeast Asian textiles to numerous publications including Power Dressing: Textiles for Rulers and Priests (2005) and Sacred Threads: Ceremonial Textiles of Southeast Asia (2001). Lee began her career with the National Museum of Singapore in 1985, before setting up the Chinese and Southeast Asia galleries at the Asian Civilisations Museum. Returning to the National Museum as Director, she was pivotal in guiding the museum through its redevelopment and re-launch in December 2006.

Image credit: Ice Tede Dara in the process of drying yarns dyed with morinda citrifolia. Pedèro, West Savu, 2017. Photo Geneviève Duggan.

Chaired by Dinu Bodiciu (Romania/Singapore), Fashion Lecturer, LASALLE College of the Arts

Discussing issues of sustainability and environmentally-responsible design, the speakers will touch upon their strategies of operating in ways that cultivate traditional techniques and slow down consumerism. The panel will discuss organic production, responsible material sourcing, fair trade, and establishing cultural understanding as a means for collaboration with local communities to generate economic growth and resources.

BIOGRAPHIES

Philip Huang (United States/Thailand) made a name for himself as a model, the first Asian model to hit high fashion runways and go on to star in countless campaigns, working with the most creative and influential names in the fashion industry. This experience goes beyond fashion as it has enabled him to travel the world, and during the downtime between shoots and shows, he has been inspired to create something of his own. This “something” are clothes and things that can travel with him, lightly, in his suitcase, and be used in any context, anywhere in the world.

William Ingram (United Kingdom/Indonesia) is Co-founder of Threads of Life, a fair-trade business based in Bali that has worked with over 1,000 traditional weavers in 50 communities on 12 Indonesian islands since 1997. As Co-director of the Bebali Foundation since 2002, he has led the organisation’s support for sustainable use of natural dyes by these same communities. Through his work he demonstrates how profitable business can have a social mission, how community enterprise can be profitable, and how both can be sensitive to indigenous culture. Born in the United Kingdom, he has lived most of his life in Japan and Indonesia.

Dr Nanci Takeyama (Brazil/Singapore) has received her Bachelor degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from São Paulo University, Master of Design from Kyushu University and PhD in Design Research from the Kobe Design University. In her commercial career, she has worked at very prestigious design offices under Alexandre Wollner and typographer Helmut Schmid. She also owned her own design office in São Paulo, with major corporate clients such as Sadia Foods, Votorantin, Camil fodds, among others. Takeyama is the Founding Director of “design for,” a group engaged in utilising scholarly research to advocate cultural understanding and preservation by using design as a dialogue.

Dinu Bodiciu (Romania/Singapore) is a fashion and accessories designer currently teaching Fashion Design in Singapore at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. His designs are conceptualised as extensions of the human body, tackling aspects situated at the border between dress and skin. His projects include collaborations with Lady Gaga, Hunger Games ep3&4, KCPK, while his designs have been featured in various fashion and design magazines and specialist books published around the world.

Image credit: Courtesy Threads of Life.

Manish Nai is interested in discovering the abstract dimensions of form through the manipulation of matter, exploring the new life assumed by the cast-offs that change from objects of use—jute, cardboard, newspapers, old cloths—to art objects, divested from any function or utility. This conversation uncovers the multitude of representations and associations of indigo seen in Nai’s work. Featured in Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material is his installation of 99 pieces of compressed indigo jute cloths.

BIOGRAPHIES

Manish Nai (India) concentrates on the material qualities of the various substances he utilises in his work. His interest is in the discovery of abstract forms through the physical manipulation of matter, and the new life assumed by cast-offs when transformed from objects of use to objects of art. Using the colour indigo (indigo dye), itself loaded with a multitude of representations and associations, this opens up the visual form to subjectivities in the interpretation of the medium throughout time. Nai’s work was included in A beast, a god, and a line, curated by Cosmin Costinas, which debuted during the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 and subsequently travelled to Para Site, Hong Kong (2018). In 2017, the Fondation Fernet Branca in St. Louis, France, presented a comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s paintings, murals, sculptures, and photographs. The exhibition will travel to the Het Noordbrabants Museum in The Netherlands. Other group exhibitions include Asymmetrical Objects, Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2018); the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014), and the Shanghai Biennale (2012). He has newly completed an 18-metre-long sculpture as a permanent installation in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex. His works are on view at the Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace, Rajasthan, India (2017­–18), and at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago as part of its permanent collection.

Dr June Yap (Singapore) is the Director of Curatorial, Programmes and Publications at the Singapore Art Museum. She was formerly Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator (South and Southeast Asia), Deputy Director and Curator of the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, and curating independently. Yap curated No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia(2013) as part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative; and the Singapore pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), featuring The Cloud of Unknowing by Ho Tzu Nyen. Yap received her MA in Fine Art at the University of Melbourne and her PhD in Cultural Studies at National University Singapore. She is the author of Retrospective: A Historiographical Aesthetic in Contemporary Singapore and Malaysia (2016).

Image credit: Manish Nai, Untitled, 2018, compressed indigo jute cloths and wood. Courtesy the artist.

Indigo, known as the “King of Dyes,” has been in continuous use and traded worldwide as blue dye, paint pigment, and medicine for over six millennia. Its unique chemistry is suited for all types of textiles, whether prestige silks or blue jeans, as well as paint for frescoes and manuscripts. In this richly-illustrated talk, Dr Jenny Balfour-Paul—artist, traveller, and author of three books on indigo—will speak about this fascinating colour, as well as indigo’s increasing popularity as a sustainable dye.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Jenny Balfour-Paul (United Kingdom) writer, artist, traveller, and international lecturer, has researched and worked with indigo for over three decades. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University; Trustee of the Royal Geographical Society; Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society; and President of the UK’s Association of Guilds of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers. Author of Deeper than Indigo (2015), Indigo: Egyptian Mummies to Blue Jeans (1998), and Indigo in the Arab World (1997), she was a consultant curator for the Whitworth Art Gallery’s 2007 touring exhibition Indigo, a Blue to Dye For, a consultant for documentary films, and for the project Indigo Sutra held in Kolkata in 2017. 

Image credit: Making indigo from Indigofera, Southwest China, 1993. Courtesy Jenny Balfour-Paul. 

Chaired by Dr Lisa Onaga (United States/Germany), Senior Research Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Assistant Professor, School of Humanities, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, NTU

Sericulture, or silk farming, is integral to both artists Liang Shaoji’s and Vivian Xu’s practices. Liang has been working for 28 years with silkworms as collaborators, using their life cycle as a medium, while Xu is a media artist and researcher whose practice focuses on the exploration and intersection of electronic and bio media. The artists will present their experimentations with silk, while Dr Lisa Onaga shares her research on Imperial Japan’s pursuit of the perfect silkworm cocoon.

BIOGRAPHIES

Liang Shaoji’s (China) practice intersects science and nature, biology and bio-ecology, weaving and sculpture, and installation and performance. He has been working with silkworms for almost three decades, using the life process of these insects as a medium. Liang graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now renamed China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou) in 1965 and studied at the university’s Varbanov Institute of Tapestry. Now working in Tiantai, Zhejiang Province, his works are filled with a sense of meditation, philosophy, and poetry, while illustrating the inherent beauty of silk. Selected exhibitions include Cloud Above Cloud, Museum of China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2016); What About the Art?, Contemporary Art from China, Al Riwaq, Doha (2016); Liang Shaoji: Back to Origin, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2014); Art of Change, Hayward Gallery, London (2012); Liang Shaoji, Prince Claus Fund, Amsterdam (2009); among others. He was awarded the Prince Claus Award in 2009 and the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) in 2002. In September 2018, Liang will have a solo exhibition at M Woods, Beijing.

Vivian Xu’s (China) practice focuses on the exploration and intersection of electronic and bio media. While creating new forms of machine logic, life, and sensory systems, Xu explores the possibilities of designing a series of hybrid bio-machines that are capable of generating self-organised silk structures that combine the silkworms’ natural production process with automated computational systems of production. She is the co-founder of Dogma Labs, a cross-disciplinary laboratory based in Shanghai, dedicated to integrating design, research, education, and production with the areas of computation, biology, and digital fabrication. Xu holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons the New School for Design, New York (2013) and is currently a Global Pre-Doctoral Fellow at New York University Shanghai. Xu has exhibited and lectured at various institutions around the world, including the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Central Academy of China, Beijing; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Art Laboratory Berlin; SymbioticA, the University of Western Australia; and China Academy of Art, Hangzhou.

Dr Lisa Onaga (United States/Germany) is a historian of science and technology, focusing on questions about the ownership and authorship of knowledge in relation to biological materiality, especially silk. Her monograph Cocoon Cultures: The Entangled History of Silk and Science in Japan (under contract with Duke University Press) examines how the pursuit of the perfect silkworm cocoon provided a practical means for understanding heredity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Image credit: Vivian Xu, Silkworm Project 2016 – Spinning in 3D, 2016, silkworm spinning in the horizontal spinning machine. Courtesy the artist.

Silk, known as the “Queen of Fibres” as it is strong, fine, and highly lustrous, is made from silkworm cocoons through a sericulture process. The triangular cross section with round edges of the silk fibre reflects light like a prism, making silk superior to other animal fibres. The uniqueness and creativity of Thai silk is considered one of Thailand’s cultural trademarks. While expanding on the properties of silk as well as its production and fabrication processes, Dr Dararat Mekkriengkrai will share the heritage of Thai silk, as well as her experience working closely with suppliers, researchers, and designers, focusing on technological advancements, innovative applications, and trends.

BIOGRAPHY

Dr Dararat Mekkriengkrai (Thailand) is a Material Specialist for Material ConneXion Bangkok (MCXB) in Creative and Innovation Department of Thailand Creative and Design Centre (TCDC). Her role is on all MCXB management and activities as well as sourcing Thai innovation and materials from the ASEAN countries. She works closely with suppliers and research institute for innovation matching, being a key person on consulting projects and research support of TCDC access clients, including lecturer on materials and technology. Her research expertise is natural rubber, biopolymer and bioplastic, polymer and characterisation, and natural or Thai materials. Dararat studied Biochemistry, has an MS in Polymer Science, and a PhD in Polymer Science and Technology.

Image credit: Thai silk. Courtesy Dararat Mekkriengkrai.