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Author Joel Donato Ching Jacob from the Philippines is a resident author at Rimbun Dahan in July 2023.

Joel Donato Ching Jacob is the novelist who wrote the Scholastic Asian Book Award and Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award winning novel Wing of the Locust and its sequel Orphan Price. He was awarded Ani ng Dangal (Harvest of Honors) in 2021. In the same year, he was a cohort for the Clarion West Summer Writers Workshop. He lives in Bay, Laguna with more dogs than he can manage, plus a cat.

During his residency, Joel is working on the outline for the third and final book in the series.

About the Artist

Rosemainy Buang is a gamelan musician, educator, composer, and sound artist from Singapore. With a decade of training in gamelan, she is dedicated to expanding her creative horizons through collaborative projects with other artists from diverse disciplines.

Approaching art-making with a multidisciplinary and experimental attitude, she attempts to question, build upon and expand the limits of traditional soundscapes, philosophies and aesthetics.

About the Residency

A space is attached with a unique soundscape and Rose has been absorbing not only sounds in Rimbun Dahan but also in the bandar where she visits different spaces accompanied with music and the community. Having conversations with people around allows her to understand the cultural aspects that come with a space. 

Apart from gathering conversations and allowing herself to reflect upon them, Rose has been collecting sound samples not only from the beautiful gamelan here in Rimbun Dahan, but also from around the 14-acre site. 

With all these elements gathered and other available mediums that she brings and has access to, Rose aims to create and put together a narration of sounds for her Open Day — a Closing Ritual before she ends her residency, in the hopes her sounds and her stories with everyone.

Artist Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rosemainy/
Company Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skala.sg/

About the Artist

Ms. Choulay MECH (b. 1992, Kandal Province) lives and works in Phnom Penh. She is an artist, documentary filmmaker, and freelance journalist. Her passion for the job, particularly on environmental and animal rights issues, and she has a sensitivity toward human-interest storytelling.

She trained in journalism with the Cambodian Center for Independent Media. Her reporting has been published in Southeast Asia Globe, Voice of Democracy and CamboJA News. She also contributed reporting to a 2020 article about Cambodian mental health facilities for the Washington Post. She did a nice feature about the changing lives of fishing communities living on floating villages around the country’s biggest lake and river system, Tonle Sap.

She has a strong background in photography and video production as well; she’s had photo exhibitions and completed one-year extensive training in documentary film production at Bophana Audiovisual Resources Center, directing a short film “My Home” about elephant conservation in Mondulkiri, Cambodia. In 2020, she received an award from Creative Generation 4 Awards. The following year, she got four grants: one from Angkor Photo Festival, the second from Citizen Engaged in Environmental Justice for all (CEEJA), the third from SUMERNET for media – research partnership for environment reporting, and the last one it from the Mekong Data-Journalism Fellowship. In 2023, she was selected as an Angkor Photo Festival fellow.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chouly.mech
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mechchouly/
Website: https://ccva.art/artists/mech-choulay/

About the Residency

I see dead leaves drop from the trees every morning at Rimbun Dahan. These dead leaves really attracted my eyes because of their unique and original form, colours and textures. I started to wonder, what can I do to transform this dead leaf into a work of art that could speak about the forest and water?

In the day time, I hear the sound of birds chirping, I see the monkeys eating bananas and sharing food with their babies. Squirrels jump around freely and peacefully because no one would harm them. At night, some non-human friends visit me — butterflies, grasshoppers, bats.

Yet, such an oasis is a rare occurrence in the urban world!

Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we can’t eat money – Alanis Obomsawin.

Cambodia used to be covered by lush green forests but now it is overwhelmed by unhealthy development that is impacting the vulnerable people, animals and nature. When we have air we can’t breathe in, fruits we can’t eat, rain that we can’t play in, and water that is undrinkable, sooner and later we will all die. When we lack understanding and knowledge of forest life, it is very hard for us to love and care for the forest. As the Khmer proverb goes “រក្សាទុកព្រៃឈើ អ្នកនឹងមិនខ្វះអុសដុត”, translated as “save the forest and you will not run out of wood fire” — forest is part of the ecosystems that we can’t live without them, but they can live without us. From the beginning to the end, forests are completely useful even when they are dead, they are still useful as nourishment to the earth. 

To understand more about human relationship with nature in urbanity, I went to visit the Mah Meri indigenous community to learn about their history and cultural practices. The warm and hospitable Mah Meri indigenous people shared with me generously and brought me to the sea, river and its surrounding mangrove forests which holds great significance to their culture and ritualistic practices. They gifted me with their traditional handicrafts such as crowns, birds and flowers made from wild palm trees unique to their local forest. Along the way from Mah Meri Village to Rimbun Dahan, there are beautiful mountains and green forests alongside tall buildings. Such landscape made me become wishful for Cambodia’s future development, I hope we will be able to develop in a healthy and sustainable way.    

Fajrina Razak, from Singapore, was in residence at Rimbun Dahan for 6 weeks from mid February to early April 2023.

About the Artist

Fajrina Razak (b.1989) is a Singaporean visual artist, cultural worker, curator and educator.

As a visual artist, her work takes on an analysis-approach practice, using traditional materials and contemporary mediums as conduits for the archival of knowledge and by extension, forming inquiries on historical references related to Nusantara and Southeast Asia. These are entwined with an ongoing interest in issues centred around the dichotomies of ‘secularity and spirituality’ and ‘individuality and collectivity’. Working primarily with batik, her works are also translated across mediums such as image-making, installation and text-based art.

Her projects include hosting a residency programme 405 Art Residency (2020-23) and a curatorial project Between the Living and the Archive (2021). Her works are in the permanent collection of the Singapore Art Museum and private collections. She was the President of Angkatan Pelukis Aneka Daya (APAD, Association of Artists of Various Resources) in the term 2020-22.

Website: fajrina.net

About the Residency

During the residency, Fajrina divided her time between pursuing her research interest and art-making.

Fajrina’s research interests focus on (visual) culture as a motivation for understanding multitude forms of knowledge production; these formal and informal knowledge(s) are derived from archives and collections, official and unofficial histories. These interests allowed her to form inquiries on her own art-making practice with traditional mediums and review heritage textiles and cultural objects found in public and private collections.

For her art-making, Fajrina worked on a work-in-progress body creating new abstract motifs depicting flowscapes and bodily movements of spiritual practices and particularly circumambulation, an act of walking around a sacred object that involves human participation. This work is an extension of her installation work ‘after life, reverse rituals’ created in 2020. At the same time, Fajrina recreated the pucuk rebung/tumpal, a motif that has been a recurring image in her past works. The pucuk rebung and tumpal motifs, are commonly found in traditional textiles and interpreted as symbols of divinity, power and knowledge.

Below: exploring the heritage textile collection at Rimbun Dahan with Angela Hijjas.
Bottom: visit to the National Textile Museum.

Thanks to Dr Kribanandan G. N. for 2 photos featured on this page.

Burmese photographer and mixed media artist Shwe Wutt Hmon joins us in February 2023 for the first of several 1-month residencies.

About the Artist

Shwe Wutt Hmon (b. 1986) is a Burmese photographer and mixed media artist, living and working in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Shwe’s works focus on collective histories, familial ties, knots and threads of human relationship and exploring the inner psyche through intimate storytelling about people and places dear to her heart. She tells personal stories from which she connects and examines broader social aspects; vice versa, she works on social documentaries reflecting and drawing from her own position within the issue. Shwe uses photography as her main medium and incorporates archives, videos, texts, poems, paintings and drawings of her own or collaborating with others.

Shwe is the recipient of respected art and photography awards including the Objectifs Documentary Award 2020 (Open Category) and the inaugural Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in 2021. Her works have been exhibited internationally in art festivals and spaces such as Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Aichi Triennale, Singapore International Photography Festival, Photo Australia International Festival of Photography, ArtScience Museum Singapore, Bangkok Art & Culture Centre and Photoforum Pasquart.

Website: https://www.shwewutthmon.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shwewutthmon/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShweWuttHmon

About the Residency

Over these two years, Shwe has been examining her inner feelings of agony and rage towards what is happening around her on the backdrop of contemporary Myanmar politics, and facets of personal stories on how psyche, body, environment and materials are intertwined.

During the first part of her artist residency in Rimbun Dahan, Shwe is expanding her self-portrait series “I Do Miss Hospital Visit” that asks questions and creates metaphor of how one’s body and health would fade away and how one might find outlets out of a confined situation. The images in the series were created from digitally scanning the scars on her body, along with CT scans from previous medical procedures, and juxtaposing these with dried and decaying flowers, as well as old family photographs, that serve as signifiers of mortality, and the inexorable passing of time.

Since Shwe moved to Chiang Mai in November 2022, she has become interested to experiment with printing these scanner-generated self-portrait images on Saa Paper, traditional handmade paper that is very common in Northern Thailand, which is also very similar to Shan Sakku (Shan Paper) in Myanmar. The surface of the Saa Paper with a skin-like feel plus dried flowers and leaves embedded functions as a contemplative material to exhibit a body in a tender way, alongside the popularity of the paper in Thailand and Myanmar as a layer of storytelling for Shwe’s movement through and connection with both countries.

“Eventually this experimental process led me to cut, put tape, sew and stitch as my body is treated in the operation room. At this point, I am mending myself.”