This page presents three bodies of works for your viewing.

The practice of New York-based visual artist John Clang (b. 1973, Singapore) often straddles dual realities of global cities, unfettered by confines of time and geography. A double-sight navigator of a world in constant flux, he absorbs seemingly mundane and banal external stimuli and conveys his internal observations and ruminations through the mediums of photography and film.

Clang’s first exhibition, at age 20, was a duo-show at the controversial (and now defunct) Singapore art group 5th Passage Artists. He has went to on to stage solo exhibitions at Jendela Gallery, Singapore (2004), The Substation, Singapore (2007), 2902 Gallery, Singapore (2010), Pekin Fine Arts, Beijing (2012), National Museum of Singapore (2013) and FOST Gallery (2016, 2023).

He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Singapore Art Museum (2009), National Museum of Singapore (2010), LACE, Los Angeles (2011), CCC Strozzina, Florence (2014), Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York (2014), 1X1 Art Gallery, Dubai (2017), Pera Müzesi, Turkey (2018), ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2020), Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2021) and Gajah Gallery, Singapore (2021).

His works have entered the permanent collections of Singapore Art Museum and National Museum of Singapore. In 2010, he became the first photographer to garner the Designer of the Year award at the President's Design Award, one of the nation's most prestigious design accolade in Singapore. In 2013, a showcase of over 90 works by Clang was exhibited at the National Museum of Singapore. 

He will be participating in the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025.

contact: clang@johnclang.com

Time
2009

A series that involves recording a location, to show the passing of time in a montage style. There is a sense of intimate intricacy of how time moves, and how people, albeit in a different time, are actually closer to one another and traveling in the same shared space. I’ve always been intrigued by the constant subtle changes in my urban environment. Every subtle shift affects my feelings and thoughts, hence my images respond acutely as a poetic reflection of myself in this environment. 

Working on this series, I explore how time moves in this seemingly static urban space. The people become the moving energy flowing through this space, marking the changes, forming the time. These images also explore my fascination that there are probably many time dimensions in this universe. We may have a ‘life’ that exists similarly on a different path, one minute before or after the one we’re living now. We merely just exist in this current dimension, and sometimes when time paths collide, we have déjà vu experience.

Installation View

AFTERIMAGE: Contemporary Photography from Southeast Asia
Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2015

The 2010 Sovereign Asian Art Prize
The Rotunda, Exchange Square, Hong Kong, 2011

(Con)Front
2902 Gallery, Singapore, 2010

Sans the Face
2019 - ongoing

Throughout history, the ability to see as far as the eye desires is deemed a mystical power accorded to divinity. In today’s dominant network culture, digital surveillance has progressively supplanted optical vision. Its pathological omnipresence of decrypting, filtering and pattern recognition, has ensnarled humanity in a complex web of the watcher or the watched, where both co-exist in uneasy complicity. One such device which has permeated daily life is the ubiquitous web camera, a lifeline to connection and intimacy for many during moments of isolation in the recent Covid-19 pandemic, but also a possible encroachment to personal privacy and confidentiality.

Inspired by a post-it sticker slapped over the lens of his laptop’s web camera as a make-shift cover, the artist re-appropriates the stationery as a symbol of playful obliteration, calling to mind the pixilated mosaic obliterating visages of people or gestures deemed inappropriate. Turning the gaze of the web camera onto itself, he invited anonymous strangers encountered spontaneously on the streets to select an oversized post-it of their preferred colour and pose for a portrait with it obscuring their faces.

Defying identification, these individuals transmute into partial blank slates wherein infinite alternative personas proliferate, liberating them momentarily from the milieus they were ensconced within. Through consistent, systemic documentation, a typology of anonymity gradually emerges, akin to a protest against the voluminous surveillance footage gathered to analyse and prescribe human behaviour, without our agency and against our interests. Has the camera, and by extension photography, not only extended the human eye prosthetically but subsumed our capacity for being human? Have we truly come as far as we can see?

Installation View

So this is what it feels like to be free
FOST Gallery, Singapore, 2023

Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023

Being Together
2010 - 2012

This is a series of family portraits utilizing Skype technology to do live recording of Singaporean family members and project them across continents. This is how families, dis(membered) through time and space, can be re(membered) and made whole again through the use of a third space, a site that is able to reassemble them together within the photographic space that we call a family portrait.

Drawing upon my own experiences of being separated from my family as a New York-based Singaporean, this work documents and examines our condition of new-wave diaspora - Singaporean families of various races and ethnicities grappling with the same predicament of separation through time and space.

In addition, this is also an extension of one of the recurring theme of my works: the fascination with the expressions of time and space and how we negotiate our human existences within these two dimensions. This work specifically addresses the phenomenon of differing time zones, the different dimensions of our human representations, and how we can finally coexist, albeit in pixelated and two-dimensional forms.

Installation View

Anthropos
Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, 2014

Being Together: Family & Portraits - Photographing with John Clang
National Museum of Singapore, Singapore, 2013