Past Solo Exhibition
Amanda Heng: We Are the World – These Are Our Stories 07.01.2017 — 25.02.2017
Information
Event has ended
7 January - 25 February 2017
About The Exhibition
STPI Gallery kicks off its 15th anniversary celebrations and Singapore Art Week (SAW2017) with We Are the World – These Are Our Stories , the first solo exhibition at the gallery by celebrated Singaporean artist Amanda Heng. In this unique presentation of a single work made up of 24 prints and their digital extensions, Heng applies her collaborative and process-driven approach to printing and papermaking techniques to highlight the power of storytelling and collective art making. This is the first time that both Heng and STPI embark on a project that extends beyond the traditional artist residency and the physical institution itself.
Heng worked with the STPI Creative Workshop and twelve individuals of diverse backgrounds and communities to produce this truly collaborative piece that encompasses performance as well as visual elements. During her first residency at STPI, Heng conducted her seminal performance piece Let’s Chat with the collaborators, engaging them in a conversation over plucking the tips off beansprouts (an act that resounds with locals as a domestic communal task). Using a treasured object or heirloom chosen by each individual as a starting point for an exploratory process of sharing (or “performances” as Heng calls them), Heng took a back seat and listened in order to build the mutual trust necessary for her participants to lower their personal barriers and perform their storytelling with the utmost honesty and vulnerability possible. Each individual then had the creative freedom, under Heng’s guidance and direction, to explore and reconstruct his or her memories using printing and papermaking.
The resulting prints are intensely private, personalised, yet undeniably relatable and universal, woven by the pathos of nostalgia into a tapestry of shared human experience. Yet the collaborative element of the work doesn’t end there, as for the first time in her practice Heng pairs an arresting QR code with each print to transport the work from the gallery space into the digital realm at the viewer’s wish. More than just a tool that lends a multilayered dimension to the work, for Heng, the QR codes are also an integral part of the viewer’s experience that transforms their passivity into active “participants,” as they enter and delve deeper into each storytelling experience beyond the boundaries of the physical space through short videos, interviews, and slide shows online. As Russell Storer, senior curator of the National Gallery, puts it, We Are the World – These Are Our Stories is “a bold statement about agency. It expresses that we, collectively, define the world around us, and that this task can be undertaken with the most modest of means, and in the most fundamental, universal way – the telling of stories.”
About the artist
Amanda Heng
Residencies in 2006, 2016
Amanda Heng (1951, born and based in Singapore) adopts an interdisciplinary approach to explore memory, identity, social relationships and urban transition in post-war Singapore. Gaining recognition in the 1980s for her performance-based works, Heng was involved in the founding of the artist initiatives The Artists’ Village and Women In The Arts in 1988 and 1999 respectively, and is widely regarded as a pioneering figure in Singapore’s contemporary art landscape.
Emphasising everyday gestures over grand statements, Heng's practice stems from a desire to facilitate human connection, often involving visitor participation to engage diverse perspectives. Let’s Chat (1996–ongoing) is a performance that invites the audience to converse while drinking tea and cleaning raw bean sprouts, recalling a communal spirit that characterised pre-modern Singapore. Another Woman (1996–1997), a photographic series portraying Heng and her mother in intimate poses. Growing up in a traditional patriarchal household, Heng’s relationship with her mother was marked by a sense of estrangement due to generational, ideological and linguistic differences. The desire for reconciliation in middle age led the artist to conceive this work. These portraits were restaged several times until her mother’s passing in 2023, documenting a gradual process of healing and reconnection over a thirty-year period.
Heng obtained her Diploma in Printmaking from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore in 1988 and her BFA from Curtin University of Technology, Perth in 1993. Her work is found in various collections, including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and Singapore Art Museum. For her contributions to the local art landscape in Singapore, Heng was conferred the prestigious Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts in 2010.
Notable exhibitions include Presentation of Works by Benesse Prize Artists in collaboration with Singapore Art Museum (2024), Benesse House Museum, Naoshima; The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain (2023), Seoul Museum of Art; Ask Myself First (2023), Fukuoka Asian Art Museum; Wikicliki (2021), National Gallery Singapore; 2219: Futures Imagined (2019), ArtScience Museum, Singapore; and Speak To Me, Walk With Me (2011), Singapore Art Museum. The artist has also participated in major international festivals including Nurture Gaia (2024), 4th Bangkok Art Biennale; Every Step in the Right Direction (2019), 6th Singapore Biennale; Belief (2006), 1st Singapore Biennale; One Closer to the Other (2000), 7th Havana Biennial; real[work] (2000), 4th Werkleitz Biennale; APT3 (1999), 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane; and 4th Asian Art Show (1997), Fukuoka.
Heng has had two residencies at the STPI Workshop in 2006 and 2016, with the former resulting in Asia Society Portfolio (2006), a set of ten prints by leading Asian artists to mark both a decade of the Asian Society’s exhibition and artist commission programme, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Society’s founding. The latter residency culminated in the exhibition We Are The World – These Are Our Stories (2017).
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