Sam I-shan is an independent curator with an interest in moving image, photography, art and politics. She programs for film festivals, specializing in artist films and video, and Southeast Asian and experimental cinema, working with the Singapore International Film Festival and Videoex Experimental Film and Video Festival Zurich. She was previously curator at National Gallery Singapore (NGS), Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and Esplanade Visual Arts.
ART SG FILM: EMBODIED PRESENCES
Launched in 2023, the ART SG FILM program is a curation of film, video art and moving image artworks, submitted by ART SG participating galleries, with an emphasis on showcasing new film-making practices, experimental film, or art historically resonant works, particularly by artists and practitioners from around the Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific regions.
For ART SG’s second edition in January 2024, curator Sam I-Shan has created a series of four hour-long programs, revolving around the theme of the body and featuring an exceptional line up of established and emerging film artists, including the founder of video art Nam June Paik, Su Hui-yu, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Yeo Siew Hua, Hsu Chia-Wei, Chulayarnnon Siriphol and more.
ART SG FILM is co-presented by ArtScience Museum, and is screened daily between 18 – 21 January at the ArtScience Cinema, Level 4.
EMBODIED PRESENCES
Curated by Sam I-shan
This selection of artist films and video art is centred around the body in all its perceiving and expressive capacities, material realities and mythic imaginaries. Nineteen moving image works by seventeen international artists are presented across three themed compilations of short films, and a special feature-length presentation. In Movement in Space, the performing body is depicted charting social spaces, exploring relationality, and demonstrating psychological states. The films in Voice and Being assert the lived experiences of human and non-human subjects through testimony of speech and gesture. The works in The Worldly and Otherworldly crisscross between the earthly and spiritual realms, from the pervasive media environments of contemporary living, to the sensory, spectral visions of folktales and rituals. The program concludes with Future Shock: The End of Eternity a feature film by Su Hui-Yu, a dystopic, dream-like tale of the last human on the planet.
Panel Discussion | Expanded Practices: New Ways of Creating and Presenting the Moving Image
Sunday 21 January 2024, 3:30PM | ART SG TALKS Theatre L1
This panel brings together practitioners with expansive and alternative approaches to conceiving, producing, commissioning and collecting video art and artists films. Artists Su Hui-Yu (Taiwan) and Yeo Siew Hua (Singapore) will speak about their respective practices, which are inter-disciplinary and deeply collaborative. Aside from exhibiting in museums and gallery settings, they also present their work in film festivals, performance festivals and theatrical productions. Barcelona-based writer Han Nefkens is the founder of the non-profit Han Nefkens Foundation, which funds and supports video art commissions in collaboration with international art institutions. The unique way in which the foundation operates allows for artists not only to produce new work but also to have that work shown at numerous art institutions world-wide.
Speakers
Su Hui-Yu – Artist, Taipei
Han Nefkens – Collector and Founder of Hans Nefkens Foundation, Barcelona
Yeo Siew Hua – Artist, Singapore
Moderated by
Sam I-shan, ART SG FILM curator, Singapore
Movement in Space | Daily Screening at 11AM
Running Time: 62 min 22 sec
The films in this programme reflect the centrality of the body in performance, political and personal works. The performing body might represent individuality, identity and corporeality, while serving as metaphor for communities, states and societies. The subduing or regulation of such a body politic is suggested by the performances in Tanatchai Bandasak’s and Jason Wee’s works. The former depicts the methodical action of grass-trimming in a historical site of political crisis, while the latter focuses on the artist dancing alone under a highway as ambiguous poetic texts about expectation, desire and social control unfurl across his form. The performers in Tsubasa Kato’s and Markus Schinwald’s works engage in choreographies of attraction and repulsion. Respectively, they demonstrate the tension between autonomy and dependency, and the struggles of bridging intrinsic differences. This sense of relation to an other is also key in Shinobu Soejima’s stop-motion animation, which externalises upon its battling characters the complex moral stakes of human nature and the impossibility of escaping cycles of violence. In Hou I-Ting and Yeo Siew Hua’s works, the setting becomes a key player. For Hou, the figure acts as mediator and scale for her perspectival experiments in urban distortion. In Yeo’s film, an abandoned institution seems to surreally transform itself into a stage for its characters, as they use dance and movement to express the mutable yet rigid nature of family dynamics, and ask whether any person can be completely knowable.
1. Tanatchai Bandasak | BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY
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2. TSUBASA KATO | Chi-Wen
Woodstock 2017
3. Jason Wee | Yavuz Gallery
Awkward
4. Hou I-Ting | TKG+
Neither of Us: The Relation of Non-Territory (Part 1)
5. Shinobu Soejima | Art Front Gallery
Blink in the Desert
6. Markus Schinwald | Thaddaeus Ropac
1st Part Conditional
7. Yeo Siew Hua | Gajah Gallery
The Wandering
Voice and Being | Daily Screening at 12:30PM
Running Time: 65 min 42 sec
Each of the works in this programme possess distinct narrative voices that centre attention on their respective stories and experiences. While their subjects may be dislocated, or even disempowered by both choice and circumstance, they continually navigate and maintain their sense of place and right to existence. Personal histories come to the fore in Hsu Chia-Wei and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s experimental documentaries, as the main characters come to terms with displacements emerging from regional conflict and global wars. Hu Ching-Chuan’s and Yin Yin Wong’s films likewise feature émigré family members, giving prominence to their voices as they assert and adjust their presences in the new worlds that they now inhabit. Eugenia Lim and Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s works consider the politics of human capital and animal domestication through inventive use of dance, movement and music. A mysterious non-human presence gives utterance in Tanatchai Bandasak’s work, forming a poetic coda of light and sound for this compilation of multifarious testimonies.
8. Hsu Chia-Wei | Chi-Wen
Huai Mo Village
9. Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba | Mizuma Gallery
Utsusu
10. Hu Ching-chuan | Chi-Wen
That ‧ This
11. Yin Yin Wong | Wei-Ling Gallery
Lotus Flowers
12. Eugenia Lim | STATION
ON DEMAND
13. Heather Dewey-Hagborg | Wei-Ling Gallery
Hybrid: An Interspecies Opera
14. Tanatchai Bandasak | BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY
Air Cowboy
The Worldly and Otherworldly | Daily Screening at 2PM
Running Time: 64 min 59 sec
The works in this programme are layered representations of the image-saturated, iconographically-rich visual landscapes of contemporary Asia. Originally created for a 1972 performance by musician Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut’s remix of Japanese television commercials is a playful retort to the materialistic urges of consumerist living. Chulayarnnon Siriphol’s digital animation combines newspaper collages with invented characters, forming a counter-narrative to the glut of competing messages and motives found in state media and algorithmically-driven social media platforms. Both Yeo Siew Hua and Korakrit Arunanondchai’s works evoke the powerful presence of the non-human in nature, in particular animals and spirits. Adapting folklore and creating new myths, their films use primal and preternatural forces to depict, as well as critique the recursive violence of environmental destruction and political corruption.
15. Nam June Paik And Jud Yalkut | Gagosian
Waiting for Commercials
16. Chulayarnnon Siriphol | BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY
Give Us A Little More Time
17. Yeo Siew Hua | Gajah Gallery
An Invocation to the Earth
18. Korakrit Arunanondchai | BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY
Songs for Dying
Future Shock: The End of Eternity | Daily Screening at 3:30PM
Running Time: 62 min
Published in 1972, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock analysed how rapid technological change transforms industrial societies to post-industrial conditions, causing alienation, dislocation and even chaos. Future Shock: The End of Eternity is Su Hui-Yu’s first feature-length film. A follow-up work to his 2019 video installation Future Shock, it premiered at the 2023 Golden Horse Film Festival. The narrative loosely follows A (Wu Ke-Xi), the last person on the planet and X (Nick Van Halderen), who is at once a god, demon, or cybernetic entity, as they take a road trip to discover the future from the remains of the past. Told in ten chapters, and shot in various unusual and spectacular sites around Taiwan, this work flits between dread and delirium over the ever-evolving future.
19. Su Hui-Yu | Chi-Wen
Future Shock: The End of Eternity
