Southeast Asian Arts Residency

Faye Abantao, a visual artist from Bacolod, Philippines, joined us for a two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan from May to June 2024.

About the Residency

During her time with us, Faye explored various printmaking techniques and advanced her project, Withering Memories. This ongoing series, which she began in 2020, evolves into its third installation titled What Becomes of Memories if There’s No One Around to Remember Them? This collage-based, wall-bound mural talks about the ephemeral nature of memory and the existential query surrounding its legacy in the absence of witness.

A combination of various medium—photographs, tearing and the use of paper as a material—each representing a different aspect of memory. The photographs depict fleeting moments of joy and mundane routine, now suspended in time. Tearing conveys intimate thoughts and unspoken words, slowly blurring into oblivion. These layers peel off eventually, leading us to reveal different memories, the vulnerabilities and our intricacies. Paper, with its worn texture, symbolizes the decay and erosion of physical remnants over time.

It raises a question: Do memories have any meaning beyond the minds that contain them? And if a recollection is an individual’s own story or narrative, a subjective perception of reality, what becomes of it when the person who told the story is no longer there to tell it? Memory in the real sense refers to human collective memory and experiences—our histories, cultures, and societies. Without preservation and transmission these too would be lost into nothingness.

It is a challenge to consider how we choose to preserve our memories and the stories we leave behind. In an age where digital archives are vast yet volatile, the permanence of memory becomes even more uncertain. The interplay of traditional and modern underscores this tension, prompting reflections on how future generations will access and interpret the past.  

About The Artist

Faye Abantao (b. 1994) is a visual artist from Bacolod City, Philippines. She captures an essence of culmination in her multifaceted art practice. She makes homogenous the panache of creative impulses such as origami, print, digital art, photography, collage and painting.

The focus of her artistry is weaving in stories from the used books and archive of photographs that she uses into the diorama presented through her work. It visually represents herself with profiles and portraits of the human condition. It imitates life through the impact of culture and experiences to individuals. Her art establishes a link between the collection and deconstruction of altered digital images that presents a realm of memory and experience. These images have been noted for their distinct aesthetics and use of monochrome, which are common threads throughout her work. Whether depicting a personal experience, a portrait, or solitude in a peculiar context, they stand apart.

IG: @fayeperproject

Malaysian visual artist Syahnan Anuar is undertaking a 2-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2024, preparing for his upcoming solo exhibition.

Syahnan Anuar (b. 1992, Kelantan) is a visual artist and founder of Bogus Merchandise. He works primarily in the medium of silkscreen across different surfaces. His works explore the personal and political tensions in his lived experience as a Malay-Muslim male living in 21st- century Malaysia.

He is currently working on his upcoming solo exhibition. You can check his work on Instagram @kerjasanan.

Malaysian contemporary artist Yap Chee Keng has joined us for a 3-month residency from February to April 2024.

About the Artist

Yap Chee Keng was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In 2010 and 2013, he obtained an Associate Degree in Interior Architecture and Diploma in Visual Arts from New Era College, Malaysia. He went to Taiwan to study in 2016, where he obtained a Bachelor Degree from Tunghai University, and in 2020, he received a Master Degree from the Fine Arts Department of National Taipei University of the Arts, Taiwan.

Chee Keng’s artworks have won the 2022 Malaysia Young Contemporaries / Bakat Muda Sezaman (Jury Award), 2021 Next Art Tainan Award, 2020 Nanying Award (Western Media: Excellent award), the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (National Art Exhibition) Oil Painting (Category: Silver Medal), and also the National Taipei University of the Arts’ important creation award “Outstanding Art Prize of School of Fine Arts 2020” and many other affirmations.

Carpenter’s ink marker is Chee Keng’s creative inspiration, which connects with his childhood and his experience studying interior architecture. Now the line made by the carpenter’s ink marker presents a continuation of his life story on the canvas; they are repeatedly overlapped, stretching endlessly into eternity. The lines are densely or loosely distributed, or they are piled up. Countless colorful lines are piled together, injecting into the painting a sense of time and labor. Through the color combination that symbolizes culture and life, the author tries to create a diverse color space.

Website: www.yapcheekeng.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yapcheekeng/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yapcheekengARTIST/
Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/@yapcheekeng
Work in progress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbcjbmL385k&t=67s

About the Residency

“Body Machines: Life’s Rhythm and the Dialogue with Technology”

In this series of work, Chee Keng use the human body’s repetitive actions to investigate the challenges posed by mechanization and the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) to replace artistic creation. Through bodily performance, he engages in continuous actions and line-making, responding to the relationship between human creativity and mechanized labor in the contemporary technological age.

Chee Keng juxtapose human bodily movements with mechanized repetition, highlighting the similarities and differences between repetitive human labor and AI algorithms. With this comparison, Chee Keng hopes to provoke deep reflection among viewers regarding the impact of technology on traditional artisanal craftsmanship.

Additionally, the exhibition is inspired by elements of nature. Chee Keng has drawn inspiration from the life cycles and changes in the natural world, connecting the falling of leaves to the concept of life’s end. Similar to how leaves grow, wither, and regenerate throughout the year, the exhibition portrays the continuous cycles and resilience of life. This natural phenomenon serves as a reminder of life’s fragility and impermanence, juxtaposed with its enduring qualities.

The fusion of painting and natural elements prompts contemplation on life’s cycles and the passage of time, while also inviting reflection on the significance of human bodies and behaviors in the technological era. Through their artworks, the artists explore the impact of AI on artistic creation and examine the relationship between individual lives and technological advancements in modern society.

[This text was written with the assistance of ChatGPT.]

Nadiyah Suyatna, a comic artist/illustrator from Indonesia, is undertaking a two-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2024.

About the Residency

Nadiyah is currently working on Smoldering, a graphic novel about fire governance in Central Kalimantan. The project is co-written with Sofyan Ansori as part of Fire Play research project with funding from KONEKSI (Collaboration for Knowledge, Innovation, and Technology Australia and Indonesia). 

Set in Central Kalimantan during the dry season, Smoldering explores the friendship between Elin and Bunga, two high school girls navigating adolescence. Elin, a Dayak girl, aspires to leave her village and pursue her dreams. Conversely, for Bunga, who has recently moved from Bandung, the village is a new home she is trying to make sense of. As the weather gets dryer, Elin and Bunga experience the heat at the fire frontier where ideas, myths, feelings, and practices pertaining to flaming landscape collide and overlap. 

Based on ethnographic research, Smoldering engages with the multifaceted fire governance at the village level, depicting the everyday realities amid burning forests, declining livelihoods, and devastating fire policies.

Nadiyah Suyatna

Nadiyah is a comic artist/illustrator born and raised in the outskirts of Jakarta who draws inspirations from everyday life. Besides Smoldering, she has been working on another comic project about a fishing community in North Jakarta, in collaboration with Marco del Gallo. Their short comic Blessing of the Sea was featured in the anthology DENCity: Stories of Crowds & Cities as a part of the DenCity research project at Durham University’s Department of Geography. Her works can be seen at nadiyahsuyatna.com or instagram.com/nadiyahsuyatna.

Sofyan Ansori

[creative collaborator, not in residence]

Sofyan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University whose research project examines relationships between humans and fires in light of the current climate crisis. Since 2015, his ethnographic work engages specifically with how Indigenous communities in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, navigate their thoughts and actions amid the recurring massive fires and the state’s ongoing desire to enforce anti-fire policies. Website: sofyanansori.com.

Cambodian contemporary art duo Ny&Khun has been in residence at Rimbun Dahan for two months in 2023, reflecting upon their future directions, and developing a new contemporary dance work, Pilgrim.

About the Artists

Ny&Khun (Ny Lai and Khun Sreynoch) are a Cambodian contemporary art duo. Our main form of expression is dance/theatre, combined with photography and painting. We have operated as a duo for 3 years, emerging from a group called New Cambodian Artists (NCA) that still functions as our umbrella foundation.

Our work SnowWhite/Revisited was selected for the Singapore M1 Fringe Festival 2021. Because of COVID we could only show them a basic video, yet we had great reviews. The video SnowWhite/Revisited also won 2nd prize of the Expert-Jury of the international theater competition from Milan, Italy in 2021.

Early this year, we were invited to be the main artists at the international Angkor Photo Festival 2023, with our photography work series Speaking in Silence. We opened the festival with a short performance, “How do
you think it feels”.

We won the 1st ZKB Acknowledgment prize at the Zurcher Theater Spectacle Switzerland 2023, with our work Sronoh/SnowWhite. This is what the international jury says about our work.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NewCambodianArtists
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user79893554
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nca_newcambodianartists/

About the Residency

We have been on residency in Rimbun Dahan, spending time to reflect on our recent developments and our future directions as a company. We have also been working on our new piece, Pilgrim. We are so excited to share our work in progress with you this Open Day.

Marionne Contreras from the Philippines undertook a 1-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in November 2023, delving into botanical printing of plants foraged from the garden, in an act of remembering her hometown, retracing her lineage, and necessarily failing to replicate the beauty of nature.

About the Artist

Marionne Contreras (b. 1992) is a visual artist based in Manila, Philippines, with a current emphasis on fiber and fabric based works. Her works are diaristic, often with themes of memory, its persistence, its purity, and its vulnerability to tampering, with constant undertones of womanhood, consistently taking the role of the female as narrator; taking visual inspiration from textures and forms found in nature while maintaining an aesthetic that leans towards the synthetic. 

Highly aware of the universality of the personal, her works often carry intimate personal narratives despite her conscious decision to highlight their ornamental nature – to always stage them as a tableau of beauty given the parameters in which the very idea of “the beautiful” is meant to work. 

She has been actively exhibiting in The Philippines. Her most recent one-person exhibition, Poetry has left me, has just concluded last 10 November 2023 in Vinyl On Vinyl Gallery, Makati City, Philippines.

About the Residency

“I delved into botanical printing as a personal way to reconnect with my hometown. Printing plants from my mother’s garden and the wild flora along the river near my childhood home. Foraging for plants to print has become a personal ritual of reconnection with the sublime that gives all life, negating the self-importance of being human with the power to dominate, and affirming the beauty and sacredness in the futility of our existence among the multitude in the grand order of life. This particular sentiment is characteristic of the concepts that weave through my art practice, where I see nature as the ultimate source of everything that is beautiful, and where my efforts as an artist to capture and replicate that beauty eventually fail, for I am limited – what I produce is an ‘almost’ of the ideal, but that ‘almost’ can be enough. 

“During my one-month stay in Rimbun Dahan, I foraged for plants to print in a place both familiar and somehow strange. I sought to trace the family of my reliable “printers” back at home, experimenting with various botanical printing approaches combined with techniques borrowed from traditional fabric dyeing. The act of tracing lineage, coupled with calculated intervention, mirrors my recent struggle with the legal documentation of my identity, which is explored in a number of textile works I created from the printed fabrics I produced, employing patchwork, quilting, and embroidery techniques 

“To labor on the fabric I will make a final work from, which in itself, demands more labor, a final work that would be  initially seen for its aesthetic value rather than its narrative is a very close parallel to the futility of human endeavor.”