CONTRIBUTORS
- Agastya Sharma Laimayum
- Nur Izzah Binte Mohamad Iskandar
- Kalaivani D/O Regupathy
- Mayang Sari Binte Noorhezam
- Elaine Teo
“Whatever I am today, is a result of what I consumed yesterday,”
Upon googling Susie Wong, one may stumble upon Richard Quine’s film, ‘The World of Suzie Wong’. The film is a mosaic of rose coloured romance between a Cantonese woman and a travelling British painter, tastefully tied in with an undertone of white saviour complex. Ironically, Singapore’s Susie Wong, an artist and critical thinker, questions the kinds of rhetoric on gender, submissiveness and performance sold to us through classic romance films. Her performance work Dancing Alone (Don't Leave Me), 2020 shows women dancing for themselves, by themseleves, in a room where the audience is the sole spectator. Our initial impression of Susie was set in the intimate living-work space of her homestudio, which felt less like a formal ‘workspace’ and more like a space where one can oscillate between living and art-making. Susie’s initial practice spans beyond digital media as well; her journey as an artist began as a painter. Subsequently, what struck us most about Susie Wong was the vastness and fluidity of her practice. Her mindful shifts across mediums reveal her willingness to experiment while remaining grounded in personal history; we spoke of her journey from being a painter to working with found images to her future desires of being an artist. She showed us some of this work she had personally archived, notably the publication ‘The Idea of Coconut’. Her appropriation of scenes from romance films and reconstruction of the screen into book; is in and of itself, powerful. Her art writings on these ideas gracefully meld and analyse the state of mass media, and her breakdown of these ideas are just abstract and poetic enough to leave room for imagination. Every conversation with Susie Wong was a meandering and eye-opening aperture into her world. Hence, our archive of her is fondly titled,’The World of Susie Wong’, a play on the original book and film title.
How pictures and images are organised around the motifs of the tropical - a word which in western, European literature and treatises evokes a meaning of "othering." In the same way, also adopted in local films, woman is there, alluring and trapped, beating about, like the beat of the moths' wings against your fingers. Beating about, meaning making a statement without a clear objective, ambiguous and vague, as in beating around the bush. Pushing further into the edge of fantasy, as you stray from the coconut trees by the beach or river, you encounter the immensity of the jungle that lies just ahead. Like the "wildest places on Earth."
Excerpt from ‘“She painted some of the wildest places on Earth.”’, © SUSIE WONG
Pushing further into the edge of fantasy, as you stray from the coconut trees by the beach or river, you encounter the immensity of the jungle that lies just ahead. Like the "wildest places on Earth."
Excerpt from ‘To the furthest corner of the earth’, © SUSIE WONG
“I want to paint “badly”,”
After visiting her works exhibited at the National Gallery, we conversed with Susie about the shift from her career in law to being a painter. Her initial encounters with nanyang artists and their use of Balinese women as subjects snowballed to an exploration with themes like nativeness. When painting her human subjects, her initial fascination with painting saw her fixated with light and shadow and she emphasised how her home studio served as a safe space for her to host live painting sessions with a model. This fascination with light and shadow is further seen in her lightbox works, Ephemera; a series of drawings depicting her late father. Her works also explored everyday objects around her like bodies and fruits; the latter of which have turned scarce in today's day, specifically the Jambu Air or Watery Rose Apple. She served us a plate of the fruit and talked about days where Jambu Air trees lined the streets of her childhood neighbourhood, and how the fruit was picked by residents in their locality. The freedom to pick fruit off public trees felt foreign to us, leading to a discussion about the state of Singapore's public spaces. As her relationship with oil painting deepened, she now mentions her desire to paint ‘badly, like a child.’ Her intrigue with child-like or ‘bad’ painting arose from when she spent time painting and drawing with her grandchild; she noted how children are driven with a fascination for colour and tend to execute bold, unrestrained strokes of colour. She jokingly expressed an envy of sorts for this style of painting; something unbridled by ego and intellect which evokes strange feelings in her.
‘You never know when [an idea] is going to be actualised in the best way...’
During our house visits with Susie, we had the opportunity to witness her in-progress works for her upcoming solo show ‘Of pools and paradise’ at Richard Koh Fine Art. Drawing on her past experience being an artist in residence in Bandung, Indonesia, her gum oil prints navigate ideas of nativeness by collaging images and text from pre-existing media. The Gum oil printing process renders a crisp image and she expressed enamour over how the medium commands a presence with the smell of the lingering oil. With the exhibition, Susie contemplates the local pockets of paradise that the average middle class family can afford in Singapore: the community pool. Her paintings once again reflect her fascination with light and memory, but in a quintessentially Singaporean context of community pools. A series of work in progress paintings lined her workdesk, while others dried on the wall along her gum oil print. When asked about the works exhibited together, Susie mentioned how ideas of nativeness and othering have been at the forefront of her mind, within the context of film. Her use of screencaps from movies prompted a meandering conversation into meme culture, and whether or not her prints could be considered ‘memes’. Divulging into such tangents became commonplace for our meetings; a space where we could meet her as artists and thinkers too, rather than just archivists. The flow of conversation revealed many overarching themes in her work, and slowly but surely we were able to map a progression between her works and understand her way of practicing.
“,there are many points of initiated ideas and concepts; this is how I seem to work.”
We were invited to witness opening night for the exhibition, and had a chance to meet Susie's friends and document her guests' reactions to the works displayed. What started as an intimate gathering, quickly turned into an energetic crowd. The exhibition featured an interview and article about Susie's practice, providing deeper insight into her practice and inspirations. Post exhibition meeting, Susie stated how she felt lucky to exhibit her works as she had not shown in a long while. She expressed how exhibiting always gives her a chance to do what she values most, which is getting feedback and other opinions about her works. The exhibition displayed all her works together, and that in itself revealed the many ways ideas from separate bodies of work can connect. Themes of nativeness, perceptions of paradise and perceptions of mundane: these overarching themes created powerful commentary on what gets romanticised and what doesn't.