Experiential]]> Technology]]> Artistic Research]]> Wrapping up the first season of AiRCAST, in the sixth and final episode former Artist-in-Residence Yuen Chee Wai speaks to Dr Anna Lovecchio, Assistant Director, Programmes.

Get acquainted with Chee Wai as he meditates on his long and expansive journey in experimental music, collaborative networks, and multimedia crossovers. Grown out of an interest in independent music, his creative practice has evolved into a vortex of acts of resistance, melancholic drifts, and world-making gestures that reverberate with critical perspectives on the status quo. Through the course of this exchange, you will also discover how the unprecedented challenges brought about by the pandemic triggered an outburst of creative energy and pushed him even further into the exploration of new alliances and forms of expression.

Musician, artist, designer, and curator Yuen Chee Wai (b. 1975, Singapore) is known for his commitment to improvised music and experimental projects that explore memory and loss, indeterminacy and invisibility. Ranging from the obsolescent and the newfangled, his eclectic toolbox comprises noise, field recordings, found sounds as well as guitars and various electronic instruments which reverberate with critical perspectives inspired by philosophy, literature, film, and politics. Together with FEN (Far East Network), an improvised music quartet he co-formed in 2008, Yuen is active in triggering multifaceted collaborations across Asia. Since 2014, he is Project Director of Asian Music Network for which he co-curates Asian Meeting Festival. Yuen is also a member of the experimental band The Observatory with whom he plays guitar, efx and objects, and organises a range of projects such Playfreely and BlackKaji.

Contributors: Yuen Chee Wai
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Nadia Amalina
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour)
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits
02’15”: Audio excerpt from installation recordings of REFUSE. Courtesy The Observatory.
12’26”: Audio excerpt of George Chua and Yuen Chee Wai live session at Strategies v.02, The Substation, 2003. Courtesy the artist.
27’38”: Audio excerpt from unreleased studio recordings of Ishikawa Ko, Iman Jimbot, and Yuen Chee Wai, for Asian Meeting Festival. Courtesy the artist.
30’36”: Audio excerpt of The Observatory and Haino Keiji, Authority is Alive, Playfreely, 2019. Courtesy the artist.
48’40”: Audio excerpt of Imprisoned Mind from the upcoming album Demon State by The Observatory and Koichi Shimizu, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
56’59”: Audio excerpt from installation recordings of REFUSE. Courtesy The Observatory.
1h00’52”: Audio excerpt from Yuen Chee Wai’s recording of packing up the studio in the last hours of his residency at NTU CCA Singapore, 30 March 2022. Courtesy the artist. 

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Yuen Chee Wai]]> Anna Lovechio]]> Nadia Amalina]]> Ashwin Menon]]> Tini Aliman]]> Kristine Tan]]> Arabelle Zhuang]]> Podcast]]> https://www.buzzsprout.com/1845756/10684176-aircast-6-yuen-chee-wai]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Theatre]]> Artistic Research]]> For our fifth episode of AiRCAST, we entrusted curator and scholar Hsu Fang-Tze to pick the mind of our Artist-in-Residence Han Xuemei. In their insightful exchange, Xuemei discusses how her urgency for engagement steers her fluid theatre practice towards experimenting with different modes of audience participation. As she shares about her current efforts to carve out “intervals of quiet” and “plots of rest” in the hectic context of Singapore, you will also discover that the research on the topic of “rest as resistance” she conducted throughout her residency at NTU CCA Singapore grows out from another residency she did in Taipei a few years ago.

Committed to socially engaged practices, multi-disciplinary theatre practitioner Han Xuemei (b. 1987, Singapore) employs art as a tool for bringing communities together and engaging the audience in visceral and personal ways. In her practice, she creates spaces and experiences that incite participants to think outside the box of existing paradigms and articulate forms of hope and resistance. Since 2012, she is Resident Artist at the Singapore-based theatre company Drama Box. In 2021 she received Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners.

Hsu Fang-Tze is a lecturer at the Communications and New Media Department, National University of Singapore where she is also a coordinator of the M.A. in Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship. Her research interests include the formation of audiovisual modernity in Asia, Cold War aesthetics, philosophies of sonic technology, and the embodiment of artistic praxis in everyday life. Apart from her academic work, she is also active as a curator and has curated exhibitions such as Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home at the Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan (2021-2022) and Wishful Images at National University of Singapore Museum (2020). 

Contributors: Han Xuemei, Hsu Fang-Tze
Editor: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan 
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour) 
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman 
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

CREDITS
12’38”: Audio excerpt from MISSING: The City of Lost Things, 2018. Courtesy Drama Box.
15’07”: Audio excerpt from MISSING: The City of Lost Things, 2018. Courtesy Drama Box.
19’15”: Audio excerpt from FLOWERS, 2019. Courtesy Drama Box.
21’00”: Audio excerpt from FLOWERS, 2019. Courtesy Drama Box. 
26’24”: Audio excerpt from Taipei Main Station & Research Field Recording workshop part of
Asia Discovers Asia Meeting for Contemporary Performance Artist Lab, 2019. Courtesy the artist. 
35’30’’: Audio excerpt from Han Xuemei, field recordings at Tanah Merah, January 2022. Courtesy the artist.

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Han Xuemei]]> Hsu Fang-Tze]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Kristine Tan]]> Ashwin Menon]]> Tini Aliman]]> Arabelle Zhuang]]> Fang-Tze Hsu]]> Podcast]]> https://www.buzzsprout.com/1845756/10518783-aircast-5-han-xuemei]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Ways of Seeing]]> Cultural Production]]> Technology]]> Artist-in-Residence Chua Chye Teck speaks to Dr Anna Lovecchio, Assistant Director, Programmes, in our fourth episode of AiRCAST. Follow Chye Teck's stream of consciousness as he tells us about his journey with the medium of photography and his enduring fascination for fleeting forms and makeshift compositions. In recent years, Chye Teck is developing a more experimental attitude towards the image-making process creating works that respond to the specificity of a site, rather than to a subject matter, and reverberate with emotional vibrations. He has also become involved in several collaborations with other artists and he is cultivating a new fascination for cellphone images and the creative potential of readily available, off-the-shelf digital technologies.

Contributor: Chua Chye Teck 
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio 
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan 
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour)
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan
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Chua Chye Teck]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Kristine Tan]]> Ashwin Menon]]> Tini Aliman]]> Arabelle Zhuang]]> Podcast]]> https://www.buzzsprout.com/1845756/10394357-aircast-4-chua-chye-teck]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Artistic Research]]> Institutional Critique]]> Cultural Production]]> In our third episode, we open up this platform for the first time to a guest interviewer. We invited artist and filmmaker Kent Chan to pick the brain of our Artist-in-Residence Yeo Siew Hua. Beyond being both filmmakers and artists, Siew Hua and Kent have been occasional collaborators in the past and, most importantly, they are also long-time friends. Hear them speak candidly about the intertwined cycles of art-making and fund-raising, the blurred line between cinema and visual arts, as well as the philosophical underpinnings and the importance of collaboration in Siew Hua’s practice.  

The practice of Yeo Siew Hua (b. 1985, Singapore) spans film directing and screenwriting. His films probe the darkest side of contemporary society through narratives layered with mysterious atmospheres, inscrutable characters, and mythological references, all steeped in arresting visuals and sounds. His last feature film A Land Imagined (2018) harnessed recognition around the world receiving the Golden Leopard at the 71st Locarno Film Festival and the Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Music Score Awards at the 56th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. 

After A Land Imagined, Siew Hua has created a number of short films, one of which, An Invocation to the Earth (2020), commissioned by the Singapore International Film Festival and TBA21, was co-produced with NTU CCA Singapore. An Invocation to the Earth can be viewed online at www.stage.tba21.org. During the residency, Siew Hua has been completing his next major production titled The Once and Future, an expanded cinema project which will premiere at the Singapore International Festival of Arts 2022. In 2021, he received the Young Artist Award, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners.

Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore) is an artist, curator, and filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. His practice weaves encounters between art, fiction, and cinema with a particular interest in the tropical imagination, colonialism, and the relation between heat and art. He has held solo presentations at Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2020-21), National University Singapore Museum (2019-21) and SCCA-Ljubljana, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia (2017). He was Artist-in-Residence at Jan van Eyck Academie (2019-20) and at NTU CCA Singapore (2017-2018). 

Contributors: Yeo Siew Hua, Kent Chan 
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio 
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan 
Sound Engineer: Ashwin Menon (The Music Parlour)
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman 
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits:
06:42: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, A Land Imagined, 2018. Courtesy the artist.
11:46: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, The Obs: A Singapore Story, 2014. Courtesy the artist.
22:55: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, The Once and Future, 2022. Courtesy the artist.
40:49: Audio excerpt from Yeo Siew Hua, The Lover, The Excess, The Ascetic and the Fool, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

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Yeo Siew Hua]]> Kent Chan]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Kristine Tan]]> Ashwin Menon]]> Tini Aliman]]> Arabelle Zhuang]]> Podcast]]> https://www.buzzsprout.com/1845756/10373860-aircast-3-yeo-siew-hua]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Botany]]> Ecology]]>
Residencies OPEN showcases the diversity of contemporary art practices and the divergent ways in which artists conceive of an artwork with the studio as a constant space for experimentation and research. As a new development of her long-term research on plant consciousness and biodata sonification, Tini Aliman has come to regard ‘dead’ trees as potential archives of environmental soundscapes, witnesses of urban development and extractive capitalism, ecological events and climate change. Breathing new life into tree stumps, fragments of felled trees, and repurposed wood from previous artworks, the artist is reconfiguring these materials into kinetic and sound sculpture prototypes and she is experimenting with a range of sensory and mechanical modes of activation. Conjunctly, inspired by the structural and functional similarities between Printed Circuit Board (PCB) etching designs and forest underground network ecosystems, Tini is also speculatively imagining a functioning network of closed electronic circuits that mimics how these trees would have communicated while they were still alive. This project is realised in collaboration with Trying.sg.]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Nature]]> Ecology]]> Ecosystems]]> Materiality]]> Tini Aliman]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]> Nature]]> Experiential]]> Performance]]>
Contributor: Tini Aliman
Conducted by: Anna Lovecchio
Programme Manager: Kristine Tan
Sound Engineer: Rudi Osman
Intro & Outro Music: Tini Aliman
Cover Image & Design: Arabelle Zhuang, Kristine Tan

Credits:
9:11: Recording of plants in Fort Canning Park, Aug 2018. Courtesy the artist.
17: 20: Audio excerpt from Plants emit sound when stressed, ILTV Israel News, Dec 11, 2018, https://youtu.be/5YHnVdA2ZG8
24:01: Audio excerpt from Zarina Muhammad, Flowers of our Bloodlines, lecture performance, NTU CCA Singapore, 2017. Courtesy the artist.
26:35: Audio excerpt from Tini Aliman, Pokoknya, performance, 17 January 2020, NTU CCA Singapore. Courtesy the artist.
30:37: Audio excerpt from Tini Aliman, Pokoknya: Organic Cancellation, 2020, mixed media installation. Courtesy the artist.
36:08: Sounds from Tini Aliman’s studio. Courtesy the artist.
44:54: Underground sounds from the forest at Gillman Barracks captured by Tini Aliman with a geophone, August 2021. Courtesy the artist.
49:06: Field recordings of a walk through the forest at Gillman Barracks, December 2020. Courtesy the artist.]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Kristine Tan]]> Arabelle Zhuang]]> Podcast]]> https://www.buzzsprout.com/1845756/9279419-aircast-1-tini-aliman]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Artistic Research]]> Nature]]> Tini Aliman]]> Anna Lovecchio]]> Transcript]]> Southeast Asia]]> Nature]]> Performance]]>
17 Jan 2020, Fri 08:00 PM - 09:30 PM Block 43 Malan Road

Exploring plant consciousness and communication networks in forests, sound artist Tini Aliman has developed a practice that involves collaborating with diverse plant species. Together with her guests, the artist will translate captured biodata into music and aural architecture. Finding ways of interspecies communication through pick-up mics and feedback loops, this performance allows for a deeper contemplation of what it means to share existence and listen to life. Pokoknya is a term in Bahasa Melayu/ Indonesia that translates to “essentially” or referring to the root of an issue, which is a play on the word “tree.” The word could also be read as the “tree belonging to…”]]>
Tini Aliman]]> Video]]> Southeast Asia]]>
Botany]]> Ecology]]> Furthering her long-term research on bioacoustics, botanical histories, and interspecies communication, Tini Aliman intends to approach tree stumps as a sonic archive of the environment and engage them with various sensorial modalities. Within the framework of this project, tree stumps are regarded as witnesses to the ecological and anthropogenic changes resulting from land development, extractive capitalism, and climate change. Despite being seemingly devoid of life, felled trees and their stumps are in fact connected to underground forest ecologies and are part of sprawling fungal and bacterial networks through which plants communicate and send out signals that are not immediately graspable by the human ear. Shifting the acoustic experience of listening to one that is attuned to the sonic manifestation of non-human organisms, the artist will attempt to translate these signals into audible frequencies that merge deep listening and site-specificity.  Furthermore, drawing parallels between the organic plant networks and the structure of printed circuit board (PCB), she will also map various sonic and spatial trajectories of plant sensing, survival, and communication. ]]> Tini Aliman]]> Southeast Asia]]>