I’m excited to be showing ten glass works and a two-channel video installation at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in Berlin, in a group exhibition “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”, till 8 December 2024. It is the first time I have been able to show a whole series of glass plates…
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“Taking a speculative turn while considering the continuity of family narratives, Sim grafts the image of her young child and her disappeared grandfather into these found magic lantern slide images. While they could never meet in real life, the lineage and connection between Sim’s child and grandfather is enacted in this highly constructed–if not already…
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My video “Requiem” is showing in the “Disobedience Archive” group exhibition, part of the main show at the 60th Venice Biennale (20 April – 24 Nov 2024). Curated by Marco Scotini, assistant curator Arnold Braho. Requiem, 2017 from “One Day We’ll Understand”, 2015-on-going Single-channel video and sound installation, 16:9, sound, colour Duration: 06:08 mins Requiem…
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Thrilled to announce the world premiere season of “One Day We’ll Understand” 《有那么一天》, a new multimedia performance I’ve been making from my long project on the anti-colonial war in Malaya. This production is a commission by the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, for Esplanade Presents: The Studios, and will be presented at Singtel Waterfront…
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My glass works from “The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten” and the two-channel video “The Mountain That Hid” are in the group exhibition “Nomadic”, curated by Dr. Vennes Cheng, at the The Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. It opened on 21 March and is on till 2 June 2024. In these lovely installation…
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I’m grateful to curator Matthew Lawson Garrett and the team at Datsuijo independent art space for mounting this solo exhibition of my work in Tokyo, transforming my first artist book into a physical installation (and with translation into Japanese)! The book, “She Never Rode That Trishaw Again” (https://chiyinsim.com/she-never-rode-that-trishaw-again/), is the first of possibly four I’m…
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My series of glass works The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten and two-channel film The Mountain That Hid are in a group exhibition “Double Exposure” at Camera Austria in Graz. Curatorial text by Anna Voswinckel: The examination of the complex, transnational political entanglements of colonialism and its traumatic effects on (family) biographies forms the starting…
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I first became interested in Magic Lantern slides in learning through @gabbymoser’s scholarship about how they were a colonial pedagogical tool — specifically, they were used in a series of eight lectures cast as geography lessons to teach pupils around the British empire about its colonies. I became interested in what was inscribed in those…
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“The Suitcase Is A Little Bit Rotten”, drawn from a series of 40 glass slides , and “The Mountain That Hid”, a two-channel video work, are on view at Zilberman Gallery, Berlin, in the group show “Transit”. Zilberman | Berlin is delighted to announce the opening of its new space in Berlin’s Schlüterstraße 45 with…
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An installation of photographic prints and a newly-created VR piece, ‘The Garden Of No Return”, from my “Shifting Sands” project is on view at the Gropius Bau Berlin till August 2023. Indigo Waves and Other Stories Re-Navigating the Afrasian Sea and Notions of Diaspora 6 April to 13 August 2023 Taking the stories and histories…
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Installation views of my new solo exhibition in Berlin on my long, on-going project re-narrating the anti-colonial war in British Malaya — a story that is as small and as large as one can make it, for all the resonances across the decolonisation wars in the “Third World” at the time. A period of history…
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She Never Rode That Trishaw Again tells the story of Loo Ngan Yue, a woman widowed by the British war against anti-colonial forces in Malaya — a 12-year conflict that became a template for other counter-insurgency campaigns around the world, including Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Artist and author Sim Chi Yin juxtaposes vacation photographs of Loo…
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A solo exhibition of my new work “Interventions”, part of my broader “One Day We’ll Understand” project, opened 4 July 2021 at the Les Rencontres d’Arles. Curated by Sam I-shan. The exhibition is installed in the Abbaye de Montmajour, a Benedictine monastery from the 10th century. https://www.rencontres-arles.com/en/expositions/view/1032/sim-chi-yin A review essay on the show, by British…
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I’ve been working on “Interventions”, a new solo show to debut at Les Rencontres de la photographie, Arles in July. This is a new chapter of my ongoing work on the anti-colonial war in Malaya, focused on my reinterpretations of the colonial representation of this war and its participants. Excited to debut it at Arles,…
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“One Day We’ll Understand” 2015 – on-going Remnants Photographic installation, variable dimensions Requiem Two-channel video and sound installation, 16:9, sound, colour Duration: 12:34 mins Sim Chi Yin’s Remnants and Requiem take us on a cinematic journey through traces of hidden histories. The ethereal landscapes she conjures are an unspoken archive of an undeclared war. Evocative…
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Shifting Sands (Singapore, Malaysia, China, 2017 – on-going) The world is running out of sand. It seems counter-intuitive but sand, besides air and water, is our most used commodity. The insatiable demand for this non-renewable resource has led to environmental impact where it’s mined and to mafias driving the lucrative business. The global depletion of…
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Fallout (China-North Korea border, United States, 2017) In this exhibition commission for the Nobel Peace Prize 2017 — won by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) — I created a series of diptychs pairing nuclear-related landscapes from the North Korea-China border and the United States. My intention was to get the viewer to…
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I would conquer the Cedar Forest. I will set my hand to it and chop it down. — Epic of Gilgamesh
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Mounds of sand sit beneath a row of pile drivers on Dadeng island where the Chinese city of Xiamen is building a new airport on reclaimed land.
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Every morning, a metamorphosis takes place below the ground of China’s capital. In a world without sun or fresh air, people roll out of bed in windowless rooms, empty bedpans into communal toilets, pay 50 cents for a five-minute shower, ascend concrete stairways to the outside world and transform themselves from residents of the city’s…
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Their sweaty, sinewy bodies writhed in ecstasy. Fists clenched, they punched the air and screamed with abandon. These young men and women were letting it all out at a concert by Myanmar’s hottest rock band, Iron Cross, in the heart of the old capital of Yangon.
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Deep in the landlocked rural heartland of China, some 6 million Chinese workers lie ill with “Black Lung” disease or pneumoconiosis, the country’s most prevalent occupational sickness.
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In Los Angeles and Beijing alike, millions of workers who have left their homes and often their families in search of prosperity find themselves at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
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Thousands of Indonesians armed with plastic scoops, pick axes and jerry cans work to find tin each day on Bangka Island – just off the eastern coast of Sumatra — extracting the tin that becomes the solder that binds components in the world’s tablet computers, smartphones, and other electronics.
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