Susie Wong
Residency period
4 June – 30 November 2018
About
Susie Wong (b. 1956, Singapore) began her artistic practice in the late 1980s as a painter and art writer, later developing curatorial projects focused on collaboration and women’s issues. In recent years, her work has engaged with memory and loss, documentation and nostalgia through a variety of mediums such as painting, drawing, and time-based installation. She participated to group exhibitions at The Substation, Singapore (2016, 2010, 2008), The Esplanade, Singapore (2015, 2013); and Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2012).
Focus
In the last decade, the artistic practice of Susie Wong unfurled as a prolonged reflection on the nature of memory and the symbolic layers embedded in different modes of representation. During her six-month residency, she is intent on examining the iconic status of certain typologies of images in order to understand how their meaning is affected by the circulation on the web and other modes of consumption. The artist engages with the tropes of romance through the lens of pop culture, from the cult film The World of Suzie Wong (1960) to contemporary East Asian dramas. The fabrication of feelings and the normalization of romance in the mass media is the subject of a series of works which, through subtle gestures of over-layering, inscription, and re-imagining, reflect on the universal currency of romantic clichés, the subtle traps of translation, and the entanglement of desire and exoticism in the representation of the “East.”
Residencies brochure (October – December 2018)
Residencies brochure (July – September 2018)