ABOUT THE ARTISTS

KENNETH TAM

Kenneth Tam (b. 1982, Queens; lives and works between Houston and Queens) received an MFA (2010) and a BFA from Cooper Union (2004). Tam is currently assistant professor at Rice University, Houston.

Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Bridget Donahue, New York (2025); Tuft’s University Art Gallery, Medford (2024); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023, 2019, 2016); Ballroom Marfa (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2021); Queens Museum (2021); Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (2021); The Kitchen, New York (2020); Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville (2020); Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin (2019); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2018); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018); and MIT List Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge (2017).

Selected group exhibitions have been held at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2024); Kadist, San Francisco (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2023); The Shed, New York (2021); SculptureCenter, Queens (2019); 47 Canal, New York (2018); Hollybush Gardens, London (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); and Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2016).

Tam is a recipient of Gold Art Prize (2025); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists (2023), New York State Council on the Arts Grant (2023), New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work (2021), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2023, 2019, 2016), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2015), and Art Matters Foundation Grant (2013). Tam has participated in residencies at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica (2018); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, New York (2017); and Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2015).

Tam’s work is in the collections of Akeroyd Collection; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford; Dallas Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kadist Art Foundation; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford.

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LEE MOK YEE

Lee Mok Yee (b. 1988, Klang, Malaysia) is an artist currently based in Kuala Lumpur. He graduated from the Dasein Academy of Art in Kuala Lumpur and later from the Fine Art programme at the University of London in Middlesex. Lee’s work is process-oriented and often interrogates the material aspect in art-making. He frequently works with readymade or store-bought objects, rearranging these materials as an act of interrogation against uniformity, pushing against the boundaries of function in mass production. In the re/arranging, he questions the idea of moving within structures as an exploration of change and its futilities.

Lee’s work has been presented in Germany, London, Singapore, and South Korea, along with a sustained presence in Kuala Lumpur. His most recent solo exhibition was The Pyramid Series (2023). Earlier presentations include Rudiments (2022, duo with Mark Tan) and A Rhetorical Garden (2021). He received the Gold Prize at the UOB Painting of the Year award in 2021. Collaborative projects and residency-driven exchanges form a significant part of his practice.

He recently completed a residency in Arles, France, in 2022, under the auspices of Alliance française in Malaysia. In 2021, he was a grantee of the British Council Connections through Culture grant, which allowed him to have an online residency with British artist, Laura Porter. In the same year, he initiated a temporary collective called “Labour and Weight” with local art and cultural workers Okui Lala, Yeo Lyle, and Koe Cheng Gaik. The project was funded by CENDANA’s Art in the City Public Art Commissioning Project and later exhibited at Multimedia University in Cyberjaya in 2023.

He is currently part of the 2025 Khazanah Associate Artist Residency, a 12-week programme at ACME Studios in London that supports artistic development through cross-cultural exchange and professional growth. The residency strengthens Khazanah’s broader efforts to nurture creative practitioners who contribute to Malaysia’s cultural landscape.

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MING WONG

Born in Singapore in 1971 and currently based in Berlin, Ming Wong is an artist whose practice critically examines the politics of “performing” and “re‑enactment” through video, performance, and installation. He explores how cultural identity is constructed and represented.

Wong’s work often begins by reassembling world cinema history and popular culture — not to indulge nostalgia through mimicry, but to reveal how performative “selves,” shaped by originality, legitimacy, gender normativity, and national identity, are socially constructed and consumed. In his signature works, he uses his own body to perform cinematic roles, deliberately shifting language, gender, and ethnicity to question the nature of performance and the cultural representations it perpetuates.

Later, his interests expanded into the intersection of Asian theatrical traditions and speculative imagination. In particular, he engages with traditional forms like Beijing Opera and Cantonese opera, interwoven with sci‑fi aesthetics.

One notable installation is Wayang Spaceship (2022), which envisions a mobile Cantonese Opera stage in Singapore as a spaceship. This large‑scale installation uses SF visual rhetoric to explore post-colonial state formation and immigrant cultures. The “wayang” here serves both as a theatrical stage and as a metaphor for social performance. By mixing archival Cantonese‑Opera footage, sci‑fi cinema, and snippets from Wong’s own video works, the piece creates a visual space that transcends time, place, and gender, offering a poetic and critical reflection on Singapore’s multicultural identity.

A recurring theme across Wong’s body of work is what might be called “retrofuturism” — a cross-temporal layering that fuses traditional Eastern elements with gender-bending and cross‑dressing performance.

In his photo‑based series like Astro Girl (2015) and video work Windows on the World (Part 1) (2014), Wong portrays himself as an astronaut wandering through a spaceship set, performing an aria from Cantonese Opera. This is not mere aesthetic experiment; it connects the myth of 1960s – 70s Asian “progress” with contemporary disruptions of gender and cultural boundaries.

In his latest photographic collage prints, he combines found photographs of Wayang actors from Singapore and Malaysia from the 1950s-70s, illustrations of Soviet space exploration and science fiction from the same period sourced from Ukrainian booksellers, Chinese ink painting and dichroic films that change colour at different angles. These pieces overlay different historical and geographic layers to present a “multi-focal vision” that unites past and future perspectives.

Wong’s practice is always an act of cultural translation and slippage; it serves as a mechanism for audiences to relativize the act of seeing itself. His world — where different times, cultures, and genders intersect — offers rich insights into expressions of complex identities in our global age.

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MM YU

MM Yu (B.1978, Manila) has worked between photography and painting since obtaining her degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2001. Her works in both media tackle the nuances achieved between composition and color as they occupy the frame. Primarily drawn to street photography and documenting the everyday, her photographs evoke the ever-changing cultural texture and topology of Manila as seen through its inhabitants, the city’s infrastructure, and its waste product, as it archives not only the economy but also the ecology of life in the myriad forms it takes in the city.

The hybridity and density of MM Yu’s subjects remind us of how objects and signs are not necessarily self-contained but take part in larger systems of interaction. These recorded static scenarios show, through their thematic variety, the artist’s interest in discovering and valuing the fleeting moment present even in its simplest components. Through her ongoing interest in deciphering the enigma of the unseen landscape of ordinary things, they also force us to rethink what our minds already know and rediscover what our eyes have already seen.

Yu is a recipient of the Cultural Center of the Philippines 13 Artist Award (2009), Ateneo Art Awards (winner in 2007, shortlisted in 2011/2012), Sovereign Asian Art Prize finalist (2010), and Goethe-Institute Climate Change workshop grant (2014).

She received her BFA in Painting from the University of the Philippines and completed residencies with Big Sky Mind, Manila (2003), Common Room Bandung Residency Grant (2007), and Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France (2013).

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SEAN LEAN

Sean Lean (b. 1981, Kuala Lumpur) is an artist whose practice spans painting, industrial materials, and automotive finishes. His work develops from Malaysian-Chinese histories, personal memory, and the cultural tensions shaped by tradition, aspiration, and the shifting values of a multicultural society. He often begins with fragments from his own life and moves toward broader questions of identity, belonging, and the narratives that shape the region.

He has exhibited in Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, and China. In 2024 he took part in And the invader’s fear of memories, curated by Line Dalile, which placed his work alongside Lawrence Abu Hamdan, FX Harsono, and other artists engaged with memory, testimony, and the pressures of historical silence. Major bodies of work such as Flesh: Blacks and Whites (2013), Motherland (2015), 3 (2018), M2 (2020), china (2022), and COLORED trace his ongoing engagement with introspection and cultural inheritance. These exhibitions investigate the changing meanings of Chineseness and the negotiations within diasporic identity, while his material language has expanded into aluminium, mild steel, and automotive paints to consider industry, modernity, and the uncertain stability of cultural symbols.

Lean has also taken part in international collaborations, including a commission for KENZO with Tiger Beer and WWF inspired by conservation stories of wild tigers, and a special cover for Bazaar Art magazine. Across his projects he considers how personal history intersects with collective memory, revisiting traditions, belief systems, and inherited expectations through a contemporary lens that combines research, humour, and attentive craft.

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TINTIN WULIA

Tintin Wulia (b. 1972, Denpasar, now based in Brisbane, Godalming, and Gothenburg) is an artist and senior researcher at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg. Her work over the past quarter century was showcased in the retrospective exhibition Tintin Wulia: Things-in-Common at the Hiroshima MoCA (2024–25).

She has previously exhibited in major exhibitions such as the Istanbul Biennale (2005), Yokohama Triennale (2005), Jakarta Biennale (2009), Moscow Biennale (2011), Gwangju Biennale (2012), Asia Pacific Triennale (2012), and Sharjah Biennale (2013). In 2017 she represented Indonesia in the 57th Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion, 1001 Martian Homes. Her work is part of public and private collections including the Van Abbemuseum, Singapore Art Museum, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, and He Xiangning Art Museum.

She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow in 2018 with the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and a recipient of Australia Council for the Arts’ Creative Australia Fellowship 2014–2016. Her project Trade/Trace/Transit (2014–2016) was supported by Australia Council for the Arts’ New Work, Mid Career grant.

Wulia joined the University of Gothenburg as a Postdoctoral Fellow in design, crafts, and society with a focus on migration (working with the university’s Centre on Global Migration, based in the School of Global Studies), 2018–2020. She then secured a 2021–2023/4 Swedish Research Council grant for her project Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare as its Principal Investigator. She is also currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of International History, and a sole collaborator for political scientist William Walters (PI) in the SSHRC/CRSH-funded Rethinking declassification: dis/closure, infrastructure, aesthetics, 2024–30.

Wulia’s current project, Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change (THINGSTIGATE), for which she is Principal Investigator forming and leading a research group, is funded by the European Research Council (ERC), 2023–28.

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WONG CHEE MENG

Wong Chee Meng (b. 1975, Taiping, based in Selangor) builds his practice around a distinctive relationship with vision. An accident in his youth altered how his eyes register depth and detail, which means the world reaches him as shifting planes, twin contours, and blurred outlines. This condition becomes a method. He paints in successive layers that appear to cross and fold into one another, creating images that hold multiple readings depending on where the viewer chooses to place their focus. Hidden forms surface gradually. Other elements drift into camouflage. The act of looking becomes slow, attentive, and reflective.

His work grows from an interest in how images take shape through accumulation and erasure. He assembles familiar motifs, daily objects, cultural references, and symbolic forms, then lets them merge into intricate chains of colour and pattern. Many of these sources arise from the rhythm of ordinary life and from the visual vocabulary of Chinese Malaysian culture. Lucky numbers, charms, auspicious phrases, and homophones often appear within his compositions, softened or concealed within the lattice of paint. Folkloric imagery and fragments from older stories also recur, giving his works a sense of memory threaded through contemporary life.

Across his exhibitions he has continued to refine this visual language. Good Days Will Come (2020) introduced an approach influenced by optical science, in which 3D-anaglyph techniques create images that shift with red or cyan filters. Viewers encounter one painting that carries three realities depending on how they choose to see it. Earlier works in Have You Ever (2017) used beach balls as recurring metaphors for possibility, movement, and the uncertainty of daily decision making. In all these series, Wong balances playfulness with quiet clarity, asking how perception shapes our understanding of the world around us.

Active since 1996, Wong has shown widely in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, Cuba, and the Czech Republic. His paintings have been presented at platforms such as ART SG, Art Stage Jakarta, the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum and the National Visual Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur. He undertook a residency at Mali Hom in Penang in 2007 and represented Malaysia in an international exhibition in Havana in the same year. His works form part of collections including Axiata, Rimbun Dahan, ABN Amro Bank, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Visual Art Gallery.

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