ART SG 2024 – FOCUS Sector

Wei-Ling Gallery presents Wong Chee Meng at ART SG 2024 under the Focus Sector. Beyond the surface celebration of diversity and unity, Wong Chee Meng’s new artworks put together various facets of Malaysian and Singaporean cultures within seemingly unassuming visuals. These pieces carry immense visual impact, unveiling innovation through Chee Meng’s adept utilisation of Augmented Reality (AR). This infusion of AR infuses vitality into a dynamic and interactive dimension within his works, that allows viewers to curate their own unique viewing trajectories and fosters a relationship that is genuinely personal by enabling each viewer to manage the intricacy and dimensions of the artwork. His art goes deeper, exploring hidden layers that not only reveal the beauty and nostalgia but also challenge the authenticity and integrity of cross-cultural interactions.

Visitor’s Information

Friday, 19 January | 12pm – 7pm
Saturday, 20 January | 11am – 7pm
Sunday, 21 January | 11am – 5pm

Tickets: Limited advance tickets are now available. Buy now and save.

Venue: Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Singapore

ART SG 2024 – Film

The Gallery is also presenting ‘Lotus Flowers‘ by multidisciplinary Dutch artist Yin Yin Wong, a short film capturing Yin Yin learning to fold lotus flower napkins from their mother. The film evokes memories tied to the symbolic significance of the lotus flower and reminisces about ‘Choong Kee [松记]’, their family restaurant. During the film, their mother talks about real-life lotus flowers that reveals an anecdote about a cautionary tale from Malaysia where picking wild lotus flowers leads to getting trapped in surrounding quicksand and drowning, serving as a metaphor for the diasporic experience of Easterners venturing to the West for a better life but finding themselves stuck with no return.

In addition, the showcase includes ‘Hybrid: An Interspecies Opera‘ by American artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg. This documentary, with an original score by composer Bethany Barrett, intimately explores the interspecies relationship central to xenotransplantation— the genetic engineering of pigs for human heart transplantation. The film enquires on whether CRISPR gene editing represents a groundbreaking shift or a continuation of traditional selective breeding practices. It incorporates documentary footage from porcine research facilities and archaeological archives at Ludwig Maximilians Universität (LMU) Munich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

ART SG FILM is held at ArtScience Museum
ArtScience Cinema
L4, 6 Bayfront Ave Singapore, 018974

ABOUT THE ARTIST

WONG CHEE MENG (B. 1975)

Wong Chee Meng’s view on the world is skewed by the blurring of lines and double images – the result of an accident that left him with permanent damage to his vision. Playing on the way he sees things, in multiple layers, sometimes crossing over and overlapping, his works are complex and multi-faceted. By meticulously painting layer upon layer of images, he camouflages many stories and hidden vistas, creating harmonious compositions that reveal deeper references, as we focus and look beyond the surface.

Active as an artist since 1996, Wong Chee Meng has been represented on numerous local and international art platforms. His work can be labelled as Contemporary Pop with a focus on Social Realism. He was selected as the artist in residence at the Mali Hom Residency in Penang in 2007 and represented Malaysia at an exposition of Malaysian art in Havana Cuba in 2006. His works have been widely collected by both private and public institutions and can be seen in the collections of Axiata, Rimbun Dahan, ABN Amro Bank, Aliyah & Farouk Khan Collection, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Visual Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

YIN YIN WONG (B.1988)

Yin Yin Wong is a multidisciplinary artist working across a range of media including film, sculpture, drawing and site-specific installation. Through an auto-ethnographic lens they explore and question the dominant frameworks that govern the various marginalised identities and cultures they embody. Previously as a graphic designer and art director they worked around the notion of democratising access to visual culture through the publishing of artist books and the curation of exhibitions and public programmes.

Currently they are researching possible bridges between their modernist graphic design education and their Chinese-Malaysian diasporic upbringing. By focusing on themself as a site where different legacies and languages converge and complicate each other, Wong looks for a common ground that speaks cross-culturally. Recently Yin Yin’s work has been presented at A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; Natasha– Singapore Biennale ’22 and Venice Biennale ’22.

HEATHER DEWEY-HAGBORG (B. 1982)

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique. Her controversial biopolitical art practice includes the project ‘Stranger Visions’ in which she created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material (hair, cigarette butts, chewed up gum) collected in public places.

Heather has shown work internationally at events and venues including the World Economic Forum, the Daejeon Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, and the Shenzhen Urbanism and Architecture Biennale, Transmediale, the Walker Center for Contemporary Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and PS1 MoMA. Her work is held in public collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Victoria andAlbert Museum, SFMoMA, among others, and has been widely discussed in the media, from the New York Times and the BBC to Art Forum and Wired.