NEWS

So this is what it feels like to be free

 

So this is what it feels like to be free
a solo exhibition curated by Kong Yen Lin

Exhibition Date: January 7 - March 4, 2023
Artist and Curator’s Talk: January 7 (Sat), 3 - 4pm
Opening: January 7 (Sat), 3 -7pm
Venue: FOST Gallery, Singapore


In conjunction with Singapore Art Week 2023, FOST Gallery is proud to present So this is what it feels like to be free, a solo exhibition premiering three new bodies of work by visual artist John Clang. The presentation marks a particularly introspective and productive phase in his artistic practice influenced by his recent foray into the realm of filmmaking.

Surveillance is the dominant nomenclature of our image-centric lives, ever since network culture has profoundly transformed ways we perceive and relate to the world. In this solo exhibition presenting three new bodies of work, visual artist John Clang addresses the complexities of personal privacy, self-knowledge and identity formation by surveying delicate interstices between the private, public and secret. Working at the crossroads of observation, intervention, and performance, he contemplates on how one's inner and outer subjectivities and realities are crystallised across diverse social and historical milieus. Adopting a constellation of methodologies spanning the esoteric to quotidian – from extrapolating the ubiquitous post-it stuck onto laptop web cameras for privacy to individual pursuits of freedom, to the practice of an ancient wisdom shedding light on one’s destiny – this showcase studies the permutations in which the self can be multiplied, reconstituted and deepened.

Singapore Panorama, Singapore International Film Festival 2022

Absent Smile

World Premiere at Singapore Panorama, Singapore International Film Festival 2022

Ten years after an elderly couple takes a special portrait with their absent son who lives overseas, their sense of yearning grows into a habit where long distance phone calls and mundane repetitions are temporary remedies to a complex longing.

Screening: Thursday, December 1, 2022
Time: 6:30pm

Trailer here

Tickets on sale on November 2, 2022
Venue: Golden Village Plaza, Hall 9
Address: 68 Orchard Road, Plaza Singapura, Singapore 238839
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Buy tickets here

The Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) is the longest-running film festival in Singapore. The festival has a focus on showcasing international films and providing a global platform for the best of Singapore and Southeast Asian cinema.

Singapore Panorama: Presenting the latest feature and short films that showcase talents in local filmmaking, with its finger on the pulse of the most exciting developments in Singapore cinema.

https://sgiff.com/films/absent-smile/

Thursday Cinema "What is normal, anyway?"

The program reflects upon shared concerns of our current time, while accentuating emerging possibilities of the ways we relate to the world. Posed as a rhetorical question, What is normal, anyway? tackles the idea of social constructs through unique settings of diverse cultures, and examines how established ways affect the complex and vast systems we live in. Bringing the notion of normality into question through individual and collective narratives, the selection also highlights the potential of storytelling in envisioning the future. 

 

A Love Unknown

Screening: Thursday, June 30, 2022
Time: 7pm
Venue: SALT Beyoğlu Walk-in Cinema


Asian Film Festival Barcelona

 

A Love Unknown
Asian Film Festival Barcelona 2021

Two distant strangers, a woman in New York and her abandoned daughter she has never met in Singapore, try to break their endless fall into depression towards a better life. Elsewhere in a parallel universe, they live different fates.

Date: October 28 - November 10, 2021

Watch it on FILMIN (online), click HERE

https://asianfilmfestival.barcelona/2021/film-item/a-love-unknown/

Trailer here

5th Passage: In Search of Lost Time

5th Passage Invitation.jpg
 

5th Passage: In Search of Lost Time, a group exhibition curated by John Tung

Exhibition Date: September 24 - October 17, 2021
Venue: Gajah Gallery Singapore
Artists: Chu Chu Yuan, Eve Tan, Jason Lim, John Clang, Kai Lam, Ray Langebach, Siew Kee Liong, Susie Lingham, Susie Wong, Suzann Victor

In 1991, 5th Passage was founded by a small group of emerging Singaporean artists who strived to bring the arts to the public. Setting up their space in the fifth-floor passageway of Parkway Parade, Singapore’s first major suburban mall, 5th Passage situated itself within the ‘ready-made public’ of civic centres, and became Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored artist-run initiative. A number of substantial exhibitions, events, and activities were realised while the collective operated between 1991 and 1996. They experimented with varied site-specific, contemporary mediums, such as performance art and installation, and addressed a wide range of social concerns, from race, gender and sexuality, to the environment. In doing so, they sparked urgent conversations that spoke to the lived realities of their public.

Yet, the historicisation of 5th Passage remains conspicuously absent from dominant narratives of the country’s art history. Recognising that the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were, 5𝙩𝙝 𝙋𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙜𝙚: 𝙄𝙣 𝙎𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙘𝙝 𝙤𝙛 𝙇𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚 looks to memories of the collective’s existence to reconstitute a basis for establishing the initiative’s significance within the wider arc of the country’s arts and cultural development. Bringing together artists who had presented works under its auspices, this exhibition revives in the wider public consciousness the plethora of programmes that articulated the initiative’s ideals and aspirations, while intimating the passage of time that has since elapsed. As a consequence, the exhibition begs the question: to what extent did the delay in historicisation result in material harm to the corpus of 5th Passage?

Singular Screens, Singapore International Festival of Arts 2021

A Love Unknown SIFA.jpg
 

A Love Unknown

Singular Screens, Singapore International Festival of Arts 2021

First screening: Friday, May 21, 2021
Time: 8pm

Second screening: Saturday, May 29, 2021
Time: 2pm

Tickets here

Trailer here

Venue: Oldham Theatre
Address: 1 Canning Rise, Singapore 179868
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Curated by the Asian Film Archive (AFA) for the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2020 (SIFA), Singular Screens celebrates diverse, independent and singular visions from Singapore and around the world. Discover a bold palette of cinematic adventures, featuring the ingenious and risk-taking in film.