6 artworks & artists to check out at Art SG

Happening between Jan 12 to 15, the biggest art fair launch in Asia Pacific in a decade, Art SG is making its way to our sunny shores.

Organised by The Art Assembly, the fair will be held at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, playing host to 1000+ artists from 30+ countries.

Unsure of where to start your art exploration? Here are six artworks and artists new art collectors need to check out this Art Week:

You're Projecting Again (2022) by Samuel Xun

Samuel Xun is a multidisciplinary artist based in Singapore whose work includes sculpture, installation, and textile compositions, informed by film, culture, and personal narratives. Having graduated from Lasalle College of the Arts, he also holds a BA in Fashion Design & Textiles.

Xun's oeuvre cross-references the hegemonic framework of alternative identity within the national rhetoric and world-at-large, filtered through the lens of lived experiences and the psychoanalysis of self.

Positing the use of colour, texture, and text as a means to convey humanistic resolutions to social discourse, his works subject the viewer to reflect upon their social condition, and to question their own motivations towards personal identity.

Ultimately, Samuel is interested in how art can provide catharsis, facilitate empathy, preserve culture, and foster better interaction in a digital society.

Read more about the artist here.

Shelters and Puddles (2022) by Jia Qi Lim

Lim Jia Qi Jacey comes from a printmaking background, and is interested in the advancement and explorative nature of this traditional medium; adopting techniques such as painting on carved woodblock and printing with soft pastel instead of ink.

She obtained a Degree in Fine Arts from Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore in 2019. In the same year she was awarded the Young Talent Programme solo exhibition prize.

Read more about the artist here.

Let me hear the sound of awaking up from a deep sleep (2021) by Yuki Hasegawa

Yuki Hasegawa explores various abstract subjects using her chosen medium of lithography, first in black and white, and more recently using colour as well. In each, she captures movement, structure and ambiguous mystery. Some are studies of lines, others focus on the circle.

After graduating with a degree in Dressmaking from Bunka Women's University in Tokyo in 1995, the artist began studying Printmaking in 2003, first in the Netherlands and then at Musashino Art School in Tokyo. She has exhibited widely, both in Japan and in Europe.

Read more about the artist here.

Pra-Bot No. 3 (2016) by Santi Wangchuan

Santi Wangchuan's hand-made woven works are inspired by his family's traditions and is reflected by integrating religion, stories, equipment and tools that are native to his hometown.

Born into a family of traditional weavers, he acquired the skill at a young age from his grandmother, and through his mixed media work, he resourcefully preserves an art technique that is soon to be lost, as provincial communities are faced with rapid urbanisation.

Wangchuan weaves together intimate memories and relationships, harmonising items such as personal belongings and remnants of clothes. Detailed and complex, his abstract work symbolises his intimate affection and warmth towards his family, and serves as a long-lasting remembrance for loved ones he has lost.

The various colourful weaving patterns and independent shapes that he creates highlight societal metamorphosis, folk wisdom and beliefs, as he continues the conservation of his culture.

Read more about the artist here.

Untitled (2018) by Claudia Wieser

Berlin-based artist Claudia Wieser is known for her Modernist-inspired geometric constructions.

Influenced by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, who embraced spirituality as part of their aesthetic process, Wieser broadened their ideals to consider the coexistence of abstraction and physiological experience.

The artist's hand is readily evident in a multimedia process that is both meticulous and delicate, as seen in her fine coloured pencil and gold leaf drawings. This studied craft informs her approach to the technical drafting of her multi-faceted mirrors, hand-painted and patterned ceramics, and carved wooden sculpture.

Read more about the artist here.

Zizi & Me – Anything you can do (I Can Do Better) (2020), by Jake Elwes

Jake Elwes is a media artist living and working in London. They studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (2013-17). Searching for poetry and narrative in the success and failures of AI systems, Jake Elwes investigates the aesthetics and ethics inherent to AI.

Elwes' practice makes use of the sophistication of machine learning, while finding illuminating qualities in its limitations.

Across projects that encompass moving-image installation, sound and performance, Elwes seeks to queer datasets, demystifying and subverting predominantly cisgender and straight AI systems. Jake's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally.

Read more about the artist here.

The Zizi Project (2019 – ongoing) is a collection of works by Jake Elwes exploring the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and drag performance. Zizi & Me is a double act between drag queen Me The Drag Queen, and a deepfake (AI) clone of Me The Drag Queen.

Drag challenges gender and explores otherness, while AI is often mystified as a concept and tool, and is complicit in reproducing social bias. The project explores what AI can teach us about drag, and what drag can teach us about AI.

Read more about the artwork here.

Art SG runs Jan 12 to 15, at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre, 10 Bayfront Avenue, Singapore 018956.

Can't wait to attend Art SG? We're giving away free one-day access tickets to the art fair. Register here using the unique passcode: wDGpy6CL. One entry admits one person.

ALSO READ: Best things to do in Singapore this week: Jan 9 to 15

This article was first published in City Nomads.