ArTouch: “Whither faith, whither politics? In today’s climate of complex and pessimistic global politics, is it the case that ‘one day we’ll understand’?”
Hong Kong Tatler, “10 Hong Kong Art Exhibitions To See This Summer”
South China Morning Post, “Legacy of colonialism: Singapore artist’s show on Malayan Emergency and its resonance for Hong Kong”
Yang Yeung, Art Appraisal Club:
“Sim Chi Yin’s “One Day We’ll Understand” @ Hanart TZ Gallery – the title comes from an inscription on the gravestone of a British planter in Malaysia. Installed next to it is another print: the corpse of a headless monkey, entitled “Taiping-Selama A7 Highway, Perak, Malaysia”. They are smaller in size, but a little louder than the other 19 prints in the show. A recurring sense of hollow in not only the prints (eg. the haunting calm of a manmade lake, a church tower partly cloaked in twigs and leaves, an apparition bending over in the forest…) but also the video and sound installation showing silver-haired and wrinkled faces singing “Internationale”, “Goodbye Malaya” and “Defend Malaya”. I wonder, what does singing do to one’s sense of self? Does it in some ways re-organize one’s memory? At once a “personal requiem” (from the curatorial statement) as remembrance of her paternal grandfather who fought against British imperialism alongside other Malayan communists, and a gesture of activating the past so it could be shared and remains relevant to today. What moves me is that there could have been many ideologically-driven sides to take in the context of the so-called “Malayan Emergency” (1948-60), but the artist presents no over-simplification as such. Instead, by referring to the deafening silence that power struggles, passion, courage, life, and death leave behind after they have done their dues, the artist calls upon us to think what there is to understand and how long we might be willing to wait for that to happen.”