Ink as Archive: Urban Space and Reclamation in Contemporary Singapore Art

Hong Sek Chern is a renowned Singaporean artist known for her Chinese Ink artworks. The award-winning artist features a theme of structure and buildings from the streets of Singapore and various other countries. While also an alumnus and an educator at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, she shares her skills and visionary art with future generations. Familiar landscapes of Singapore, such as Housing and Development Board (HDB) flats, Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) stations, and well-known historical buildings, are rendered using traditional Chinese ink painting techniques. These localized concepts in her paintings integrate both modern and vintage constructions. Such depictions evoke a sense of nostalgia and urban intimacy. Adding to that, the choice behind certain buildings or locations comes from significant histories that took place there. With this, Hong’s art speaks to the Singaporean context. Her Chinese ink art serves as an archive of space, amidst the country’s rapid urbanization. Here, Hong highlights the issue of land reclamation and rapid urban transformation in Singapore. As a result, the landscapes she creates may become less recognizable over time, making her works feel increasingly distant for future viewers. The artist combines interiors and exteriors of certain sites, allowing various forms and perspectives to take place within the painting. These locations are selected by venturing out to the streets, capturing them en plein air by the artist. Though spaces of high human traffic are painted, they are done without any human figures depicted. This adds a sense of ‘liminal space’ to the artist’s works. Hong also travels ‘online’ for inspiration using the Street View option available on Google Maps. Hong’s distinctive art style is heavily influenced by the concept of fragmentation in Postmodernism. Her paintings depict smudged, “fat lines” of ink, yet they still capture sharp, recognizable contours of the structures. The colours in her works add a dynamic energy by contrasting with the black ink. Hong also touched on modern synthetic pigments and how they are more colourful compared to older ones that were made from minerals. A number of her paintings also embrace a Western art technique that utilizes a single focal point to organize the perspectival plane.

Hong’s art invites a perspective of memory and care. As a female painter in a traditionally male-dominated field of Chinese ink painting, she reclaims space in her work. With that being said, she does not claim herself to be a gendered artist. Much like writer and gender studies researcher Leslie Kern's call to claim space through a female lens in her book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World (2020), Hong’s brushstrokes boldly occupy the margins of Chinese ink tradition, setting a distinctly female territory. Hong mentioned the challenging social aspect that once dictated how "women should not show face to the outside world”. Nevertheless, the artist’s “fat lines” of ink serve as a stroke of feminism, bringing a fresh change compared to the usual thin, rigid brushstrokes, creating a powerful defiance (Hong, personal communication, 6 November 2025).