Explore our archive of past NUS Museum exhibitions and programmes that work with photography as both artistic medium and research method, examining trajectories around practice, economics, subjectivities, and more.
Artist Interviews
[prep-room] Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings – A Conversation with Jimmy Ong
2019
Sketching out shifts and continuities in modern/contemporary artist Jimmy Ong’s practice, [prep-room] Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings is a prep-room project presenting a constellation of the artist’s earlier sketches, drawings, paintings, photographs, and personal effects. Positioned alongside his completed works such as the large-scale charcoal drawing, Rampogan Macan (2014), these collections of visual memoranda accumulate as an “image bank” constitutive of his artistic process and development. In keeping with the notion of the preparatory study, these pieces commingle to posit thematic ‘studies’: Open modes of inquiry for situating Ong’s extensive practice from the 1980s to the present within broader discursive formations. These ‘studies’ thus trace out points of departure for wider examinations of local/regional historiographies, itinerancies, and artistic production across modern and contemporary temperaments.
Interview conducted by Kwok Jia Yang on December 5, 2018, shot and edited by Johann Yamin
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Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography
2019
Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography is an artist project by Manit Sriwanichpoom that gathers images taken in Thailand during the 1950s to 1970s by seven photographers: Buddhadasa Bhiku, Liang Ewe, S.H. Lim, Saengjun Limlohakul, Pornsak Sakdaenprai, ‘Rong Wong-Savun, and M.L. Toy Xoomsai. By assembling these bodies of work consisting 247 remastered prints, the project offers conjectures on film photography and ethnographic lines of inquiry at the onset of Modern Thailand.
Current & Past Exhibitions
Ongoing
[prep-room] Intimate Landscapes
Intimate Landscapes is a curated discussion on methods: how does one survey, document, map, draw, represent, write, collect, picture, archive, or narrate a landscape? Taking the format of the prep-room, the exhibition is a studio-in-process that will develop and evolve over the span of a year, where three M.Arch graduates from NUS’ Department of Architecture (Lin, 2018; Mun, 2020; Goi, 2021) revisit their thesis archives, while a fourth who is presently undertaking a doctoral study at the Department (Wong, PhD candidate 2019—2023) assembles a new drawing archive.
Further reading: Beyond the Field: Notes from a curatorial trainee for prep-room Intimate Landscapes
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Wishful Images: When Microhistories Take Form
Wishful Images: When Microhistories Take Form explores the impact of contemporary geopolitical realities recapitulated under the Asian Cold War through a re-historicisation of the past into the present.Together with five artists whose artistic practices question the governmentality between the lived and the non-living — Lucy Davis, Kao Chung-Li, Kuniyoshi Kazuo, Nguyễn Trinh Thi, and Aya Rodriguez-Izumi — Wishful Images resembles a collective attempt to relate lesser-known historical events through the persistent efforts of artists, recounted and re-articulated in various forms and mediums.
Further reading: In Conversation with Hsu Fang-Tze, curator of Wishful Images
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2019 – 2022
[prep-room] Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings
First Iteration: Sketching out shifts and continuities in modern/contemporary artist Jimmy Ong’s practice, Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings is a prep-room project presenting a constellation of the artist’s earlier sketches, drawings, paintings, photographs, and personal effects.
Second Iteration: For the second phase of Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings, the prep-room project sees a continued examination of modern/contemporary artist Jimmy Ong’s practice, delving into the liquid identities the artist and his constructed personas inhabit.
Watch artist interview here: Visual Notes: Actions and Imaginings a conversation with Jimmy Ong
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2018 – 2019
Homeless: An Exhibition By Chow And Lin
NUS alumni and practicing artists Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin present a series of installation at the NUS Museum titled Homeless. Chow and Lin’s ongoing research-based project visually articulates the connection between geopolitics and global events. The new iteration in NUS puts together visual indicators of private and transnational economies, current mobility of communities, and the shared aspect of power in society. Chow and Lin is a collaborative husband and wife duo that takes its beginnings with Poverty Line, a photographic series in 2010, which has since expanded from China to 28 countries.
Further reading: Exhibition Brochure
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“… you have to lose your way to find yourself in the right place” | Selected Works by Gilles Massot
This exhibition presents the works of Singapore-based French artist, Gilles Massot. It includes a selection of photographs, videos, sketches and writings from the 1980s to the present and explores the artist’s evolving negotiations with place and the shaping of self-identity through his work as a photo-journalist travelling across Asia, his involvement in a changing contemporary art scene, and his expatriate status. While his art practice is sustained by a theoretical interest in photography’s action of “duplication and recording”, it is in its history that Massot seeks to mediate the questions of subject and its significance.
Further reading: Exhibition Brochure
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Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters Of Photography
Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography gathers images taken in Thailand during the 1950s to 1970s by seven photographers Buddhadasa Bhiku, Liang Ewe, S.H. Lim, Saengjun Limlohakul, Pornsak Sakdaenprai, ’Rong Wong-Savun and M.L. Toy Xoomsai. By assembling these bodies of works, the project offers conjectures on film photography and ethnographic lines of inquiry. The 247 remastered prints potentially survey photographic traditions at the onset of Modern Thailand, suggesting views such as celebrity and cosmopolitan life alongside inland societies and the periods antecedent to Thailand’s tourism in the 60s.
Further reading: Exhibition Brochure
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2018
Crossings: A Solo Exhibition By Wei Leng Tay
First iteration: Crossings, an exhibition of photography, installation and video, takes as a departure point ideas of diaspora and identity that emerged in Wei Leng Tay’s previous exhibition Discordant Symmetries (2010) in NUS Baba House. This is a four-part exhibition of Tay’s research from 2014-2018 that spans stories of lived and inherited migration of individuals from different generations and backgrounds in Pakistan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
Second iteration: The second iteration presents the work The first chapter it starts with the horses (2017-2018). This work asks how the human voice, through repetitive utterances, can invoke an intimacy in items and objects subjected to the mechanisms of trade.
Third iteration: As the third iteration of Crossings, The Other Shore is based on interactions with young mainland Chinese migrants in Hong Kong and conversations about their family relationships and histories, education, aspirations, and their perceptions as their lived experiences evolve.
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2013
Inherited & Salvaged: Family Portraits From The Straits Chinese Collection
Inherited & Salvaged: Family Portraits from the Straits Chinese Collection presents over fifty painted and photographed portraits donated to NUS Museum. Originating from individual and family collections, and others acquired from antique and ‘karung guni’ dealers, the portraits date from the 19th to early 20th centuries and capture some of the earliest visual representations of Peranakan Chinese in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. Through this assemblage, the exhibition explores early portrait making industry in the region, the social and cultural context sustaining such artistic patronage, and contemporary motivations in collecting and preserving these works.
Further reading: Exhibition Brochure
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2012
Family Intimacies: Anderson & Low
Family Intimacies by photographers Anderson & Low is a visual documentation of Edwin Low’s global family. While the project serves as a tribute to the Low family, it brings into light the different themes of memory, place, and identity.
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2011
The Sufi And The Bearded Man: Re-Membering A Keramat In Contemporary Singapore
This exhibition re-members the keramat of a 19th century Sufi traveler from the Middle East who lives on in contemporary Singapore through her miracles and her shrine which was recently removed. Re-membering the keramat has involved a two-year long project of collaborating with Ali, an intermediary of the Sufi and custodian of the masoleum referred to by fellow devotees as “the bearded man”.
Further reading: Exhibition Brochure