Southeast Asian Arts Residency

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.”

Shirin Rafie and Liz Liu from Wild Dot (Singapore) undertook two months of residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2023 (in May and November) investigating the colour palette of plants and unwanted materials in the space.

About the Artists

Wild Dot is a natural art studio from Singapore started by Shirin Rafie and Liz Liu, who hold backgrounds in illustration and ecology respectively. Through their combined interests, they specialize in artmaking with found pigments and fibers abundant in the spaces they work with, and also sharing their findings through designing playful experiences for other people. Their shared intention is to observe how (art)making can be an accessible way for more people to learn about the plants growing around them, and also deconstructing the material of the everyday object, ultimately working towards reducing their own reliance on mass-commercialized making tools and materials.

Prior to Wild Dot, Shirin is a digital illustrator and designer, having worked with clients in Singapore and the U.S. on designing educational board games. Liz is a nature educator, having worked at forest schools and also in the urban farming scene. She is currently a MA Research student at NTU, looking at how traditional craft practices can inform the present.

They have received the Good Design Research grant by National Design Council Singapore for their work exploring upcycled tree pigments, and are currently working on bringing natural colours into a preschool environment with the support of the SG Eco Fund.

Website: wildd.sg
Instagram: wildd.sg

About the Residency

What are the colours and stories that lie within Rimbun Dahan, and how would a natural art studio take shape within the given environment and space? In their two-month residency, Wild Dot seek to investigate the colour palette and making possibilities of the space, following their own curiosities about the plants and the unwanted objects available, and to distill their experience into a compilation of artworks and stories.

Malaysian artist Wong Ming Hao is undertaking a 3-month residency at Rimbun Dahan at the end of 2023, experimenting with the possibilities of his paint-skin collages with inspiration from human relationships with nature.

About the Artist

Wong Ming Hao, born in 1988 in Malaysia, is a talented artist whose passion for art led him to pursue a Diploma in Fine Art from Dasein Academy of Art in 2010. His international presence includes participating in renowned art fairs like “Art For All: Art Gala by Art Expo Malaysia” and “Art Moments Jakarta Online” with G13 Gallery. Wong Ming Hao has also showcased his exceptional skills in solo exhibitions such as “Unreal Reality” at HOM Art Trans in 2020. His artworks have been featured in various group exhibitions, including “Between Spaces” and “S.O.P.” at G13 Gallery and “Pure Painting 2” at Maybank.

His diverse talents have been recognized and awarded multiple times, including the Gold Award at the UOB Painting of the Year 2020 and Jury Choice at Bakat Muda Sezaman 2019. Wong Ming Hao also had the honor of being selected for the A-RES residency program at HOM Art Trans in 2018, further solidifying his position as a rising star in the art world. With an impressive portfolio of achievements and experiences, Wong Ming Hao continues to leave an indelible mark on the contemporary art scene. 

https://minghao6323.wixsite.com/wongminghao
https://www.instagram.com/minghao_wong/

About the Residency

Ming Hao is currently extending figurative painting to human relationships with nature. Inspired by colours, textures, insects, and other elements of his surroundings at Rimbun Dahan, he continues to explore the possibilities of the acrylic paint-skin collage. He’s experimenting with form and outcome by overlapping, cutting, weaving, compressing, scrapping, collaging. By constructing and deconstructing, there will be lots of unpredictable results in these works. Some of the works will be exhibited in a coming group exhibition this year. Others are planned to be showcased in a 2024 exhibition, the second solo of his artistic career.

Author Sigrid Marianne Gayangos from the Philippines is spending her 2-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in late 2023 translating her short stories from Chavacano, and drafting a collection of personal essays.

About the Artist

Sigrid Marianne Gayangos was born and raised in Zamboanga City, Philippines. She is the author of Laut: Stories (UP Press), a National Book Award finalist, and Lola Maria’s Candles (Aklat Alamid), a forthcoming bilingual children’s book. In 2021, she was the recipient of the NCCA’s Writers Prize for Fiction, which enabled her to complete a second collection of short stories in Chavacano. She is currently working on self-translating her Chavacano collection, El Vida Encantao (The Enchanted Life), to English. In 2023, she was awarded first prize in the Gawad Bienvenido Lumbera National Literary Contest for her poetry collection in Chavacano, Descarga. She teaches at the Department of Humanities in the University of the Philippines Mindanao.

Buy Laut: Stories by Sigrid Marianne Gayangos from UP Press

About the Residency

“I alternate between translating my second short story collection (from Chavacano to English) and drafting sections from what is shaping up to be my third book, which is a collection of personal essays. Inspired by “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, I aim to tell a story that is simultaneously very specific—as a Filipino with at least 7 cultural and linguistic influences growing up, and having had to move from one home to another in Zamboanga as dictated by personal circumstances and political upheavals in the city—and universal, for at its core the project is about a child going through difficult transformations as she maneuvers her way into the broader world.”

Open Day Activity

On Sunday 26 November 2023, as part of Rimbun Dahan Open Day, Sigrid will give a short talk on her background as a writer. Coming from a long line of fisherfolks who traveled from one island to another in search of better fishing grounds and having lived through several instances of uprooting herself, the idea of home is central to her work. Sigrid will be reading an excerpt from her work-in-progress while in residency, the prelude to her collection of essays entitled “All The Places We Called Home”.

In the following writing workshop, participants will be given a ‘Where I Come From’ template for a poetry prompt. This activity is meant to help participants reflect on the elements that have influenced and defined their identity. Participants are encouraged to use this template as a starting point but are free to adapt and modify it to best express their own experiences and stories. Volunteer readers can then share and read their works. Please bring your own preferred writing materials; basic writing materials will also be provided at the session.

Total duration: 1 hour

Annabell Ng undertook a three-month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2023, continuing to explore her practice focused on mark-making reminiscent of minute fragments, as well as developing her concepts of mycelium cultivation.

About the Artist

Annabell Ng, a Malaysian-born artist, developed a strong bond with her father over their shared interest in plants, sparking her fascination with edible plants from a young age. Despite her passion for creative arts and music, she fell in love with the piano at 5 and dedicated herself to mastering it, earning a bachelor’s degree in classical music. However, her journey took an unexpected turn when she enrolled in the Fine Arts course at the Malaysia Institute of Art. There, she found inspiration leading her to develop a unique symbolic language in her art using natural materials. With an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, Annabell now focuses her art on addressing pressing environmental issues, raising awareness worldwide about the environment’s preservation.

Website : www.annabellng.com
IG : @a_n_n_a_b_e_l_l_n_g

About the Residency

Throughout the residency, my primary objective is to relocate my ongoing artwork to this new studio, allowing me to advance and refine it through fresh encounters with perspectives and reflections in this novel environment. The mark-making methods I’ll employ will encompass a diverse array of forms, reminiscent of minute fragments extracted from various information systems. My approach involves a methodical re-exploration of these fragments, strategically layering them to establish a harmonious rhythm, which will eventually find integration into my paintings, sculptures. Beyond this, I intend to embark on an experimentation journey, further evolving my ongoing mycelium concepts focused on mycofiltration.