Wayfaring/Wayfinding: The works and practice of Chu Chu Yuan
Presentations & Discussion
Sun, 14 Sep, 2 PM - 5 PM
Flexible Performance Space
LASALLE College of the Arts
1 McNally St 187940
2 PM - 3.15 PM Susie Wong on Chu Yuan’s early works with respondent Daniel Wong
3.30 PM - 4.45 PM Jay Koh on Chu Yuan’s collaborative projects, with respondent Jill J. Tan
4.45 PM - 5 PM, QnA
Malaysian artist Chu Chu Yuan’s (1965 - 2025) art practice spans the visual arts, performance and collaborative social art practice. Her work also reveals a development into praxis. Through the perspectives of artists Susie Wong and Jay Koh, this two-part presentation firstly traces her early works and involvement in Artist Village, 5th Passage, the Artists’ General Assembly and its aftermath, as well as her later works which involved intensive collaborative practice, social engagement, capacity and network building. This discussion brings necessary attention to her practices of planetary attunement, and negotiations of the self within society and with others and her life as an involved observer and contributor to the wider arts ecology in Singapore.
Wayfaring/Wayfinding: The works and practice of Chu Chu Yuan is part of The Listening Biennial LAB Exhibition which runs from 10 - 15 September at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts.
Photo Credit (Top): Imagining Possibilities/Thinking Together, Mongolia (2009), Chu Chu Yuan
Photo Credit (bottom): The Re-membering Body (1999) Endurance, overcoming, Chu Chu Yuan
About Chu Chu Yuan
Chu Chu Yuan (1965 - 2025) is a Malaysian artist and cultural worker involved in organising, teaching, writing, advocacy and research. She works with a variety of media such as soft sculpture, installation, performance, painting, photography, poetry and text. The method, process, materials and language employed in each of her artwork is very much informed by and directed at specific contexts, issues and audiences. After obtaining her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Malaya, Malaysia, in 1988, she has ventured into a variety of engagements and disciplines, which includes full-time feature writing, book editing, teaching, and art management (fundraising, publicity and programming) and NGO work. She began her art practice in Singapore at the cusp of 1993/94, after foundational studies at LASALLE, continuing her learning through involvement in numerous artist-run projects while multi-tasking as arts manager, writer and educator. Her first exhibitions were with The Artists Village and 5th Passage in 1993 and 1994. She was affiliated with The Substation from 1994 to 2003, as staff and later artist, notably with the residency project, Investigating Public Engaged Art: Singapore (2001-2002).
From 2000, she worked collaboratively with Jay Koh and was Director for Projects with iFIMA (International Forum for Intermedia Art), an international art and cultural organization committed to building resourcefulness and self- organization in art and cultural production and management, carrying out projects in Burma, Mongolia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Republic of Ireland, China, Poland, Sweden, Finland, amongst others. In 2003, she co-founded NICA (Networking and Initiatives for Culture and the Arts) an arts and cultural resource development initiative in Yangon, Myanmar. From 2008 to 2009, she co-founded and ran 1948 Artspace, in Seri Kembangan new village with 2 fellow Malaysian artists and taught Visual Culture at New Era College. In 2013, she completed a PhD with Gray’s School of Art at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, with a thesis titled ‘Negotiation as Active Knowing: an Approach Evolved from Relational Art Practice’ in which she developed a framework for participative learning within social situations. Her collaborative and participative practice with Jay Koh, which investigated the roles of durational reciprocity, negotiation with difference, dialogue, imagination and visualisation within performances in the everyday in creating new forms of association, organisation and agency have been discussed by art historian Grant Kester in a few publications, e.g. in The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context published by Duke University Press, 2011 and in Nora Taylor’s Contemporary Southeast Asian Art, Cornell University Press, 2012. She was responsible for the Archive and Library at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore.
Speakers
Susie Wong, Artist
Susie Wong (Singapore) began her artistic practice in the late 1980s as a painter and art writer, later developing curatorial projects focused on collaboration and feminist issues. In recent decades, her work has interrogated and engaged with memory and loss, documentation and nostalgia through a variety of mediums such as painting, drawing, and installation. She had solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions at The Substation, Singapore (2016, 2010, 2008), The Esplanade, Singapore (2015, 2013); and NIE (National Institute of Education), Singapore (2012).
Prof.Dr. Jay Koh, Artist-Scholar
Jay Koh was born in Singapore and is a German citizen. He considers himself a Southeast Asian, is a science and healthcare activist turned trans-disciplinary artist-curator, educator-examiner and consultant/evaluator with foci on cultural studies, public participative and socially-engaged art. His Doctor of Fine Arts in trans-disciplinary artistic research was attained at the University of the Arts Helsinki, while he conducted his case studies in Dublin, Ireland. In 1995, he founded international Forum for InterMedia Arts (iFIMA) while managing an art space, in Cologne (1992-99) and joined by Chu Yuan in 2000, to initiate public, participative and socially engaged art-education projects, such as the Open Academy program in Hanoi, Hue, Singapore, Ulaanbaatar and Yangon. Prof. Dr. Jay Koh has conducted teaching sessions)workshops in various institutions, mostly in Europe and Asia, e.g. Zurich University of the Arts and Chulalongkorn University Arts Faculty. Jay has been referred to as an artist-scholar, worked in research teams funded by the Academy of Finland and the British Academy’s Frontier Program, and works professionally as an external examiner and mentor in Master's and PhD programs. Jay’s praxis-based book, Art-Led Participative Processes (ALPP): Dialogue and subjectivity within performances in the everyday.
Respondents
Daniel Wong, Art Therapist
Daniel is an art therapist with over 20 years of experience across Australia, Thailand, and Singapore, using tactile materials to help individuals navigate emotional challenges. A former lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore, (2016–2025), he contributes to the field as a co-editor of The Journal of Creative Arts Therapies since 2023 and co-edited the book Found Objects in Art Therapy (2021) with Dr. Ronald Lay. Today, Daniel focuses on clinical supervision, supporting the growth of fellow therapists. His work and contributions are also noted through his involvement with the Art Therapy Foundation Thailand.
Jill J. Tan, Artist & Anthropologist
Jill J. Tan is a writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration through games, performance and poetics. As a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University, she studies the contemporary management of death in Singapore. More broadly, her interests lie in how community art and urban infrastructure mediate end-of-life issues and care practices in Singapore and Malaysia. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Mynah, Brack, The Journal of Public Pedagogies, The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, City and Society Journal, and the edited volumes Resistant Hybridities, Death and the Afterlife, and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore. Tan’s research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation; a SSRC Graduate Research Fellowship; NUS Development Grants; Tan Kah Kee Foundation and Tan Ean Kiam Foundation. At Yale, Tan was awarded the 2022 Theron Rockwell Field Prize, and has taught a self-designed Writing Creative Ethnographies course.
