My work is anchored in the moving image and extends to performance and mixed-media installations. I deploy these divergent mediums to address fundamental societal and artistic questions, such as the relationship between the artist and participant, the role of the “proper” and the still under-recognized pervasiveness of shame. A quiet lyricism and poetic rhythm couches my explorations of shame, sexual content and the dangers and pleasures of self-exposure. In submitting to my own self-exposure, I propose my work as a gift to the viewer.
My nation-state of Singapore provides the impetus for my questions. Equally known for its immaculate streets and brutal suppression of difference, Singapore proved a challenging place to emerge as an artist, where politically challenging work is often subjected to censorship. It strives towards a pragmatic utopia but is plagued with a history of amnesia. My work is an attempt to locate myself within this society where queer sexual practices are reflected back as criminal. I refuse to conform to regulations laid down by my country, creating work from the manipulation and exposure of my body in order to reclaim authority over myself. This act of self-determination serves to exemplify the survival tactics that we all must use to make our individual lives livable.
I confront the performance of ethnic and gay self-shaming with the intent to transform it, co-opting and re-purposing its power for alternative ends. That is, I take on the humiliations of public scrutiny and remake them as acts of conscience performed for others. By doing this, I hope to transform shame into a nexus of criticality, politics, and meaning in the face of personal presence.
I commit to my work, rigorously following the logical conclusions and needs of my performance practice and my construction of interactive installations and sites. This has meant diving into shame and presenting it back to others’ peering eyes — no matter what the personal consequences. The formality of these presentations of transgressive and proscribed emotions and acts confront the viewer with a contradiction between their presumptions of what is appropriate and a validation of the personal experience of the shamed. In order to bring these paradoxes to the viewer, I use both performance and installation to establish a ritualistic experience of space, time, and the social and physical relations between them, my own performing body, and the objects I use. This remapping of relations implicates them, humanizes my own self-exposure, and challenges the “common sense” presumptions of social hierarchy and behavior.
My home context of Singapore places great emphasis on these categories of social ordering (spawned, in part, from Singapore’s past under British colonial rule and the current cultural hegemony of the ethnic Chinese majority), and I create my work with an awareness of its shifting meanings in different global contexts. In Singapore, it is asserted that propriety is worth sacrificing for. I confront the costs of that sacrifice to those who are excluded from that propriety and its power.
By exposing myself in and through performance to transactions and relations of power, sexuality, and voyeurism, I offer viewers a means to circumvent assumptions they bring to the otherwise private content of sexuality, shame, and personhood. A queer lens is held up to the viewer’s eye, momentarily refracting their perception of the world and asking them to see otherwise. Via this refraction, I urge compassion and tolerance for the marginalized and the exiled.