o

o
Amanda Heng,Another
Woman, 996-t997, pholo print, variable, Singapore Art Museum collection, used with the permission of the Singapore Art Museum

s4271

art & design

r53

We Chatted
Text by Stephen Black lmages as credited

ooo

An lnterview with Amanda Heng

Born in r95r, performance artist Amanda Heng works with various media to explore the themes of self-identity and gender roles in Singapore, as well as memory and human relationships in an urban society. Stephen Block interviews the Cultural Medallion winner.

One of Heng's most seminol works, Let! Chat hos been presented since rgg6 in Singapore, Japn, lndoneso and the ehilippines to a variety of oudiences . . , The work recreates the familiar experience of preparing bean sprouts for a meal, a customary practice in Asion households. Thistraditional chore is one tfof many homemokers and children would recoll, os conversotions are exchanged during the course of this domestic task. By bringing this activity to the public domain in locotions like galleries or

classroom, was then a studio of LaSalte College of the Arts. Here she not only learned, she began asking serious questions. Other students were also asking questions. Eventualty, these people, ted by Tang Da
Wu, created The Artists Vitlage, now recognised as

the beginning ofcontemporary art in Singapore.

"The Artists Village was a place where we could exchange ideas," Amanda said. "l was very hungry

for art knowledge and had many questions about

why things happened in society and changed our

shopping orcodes, Heng encourdges oudiences to participate ond recall the communol spirit of sharing and conversing, which may hve been forgotten, due to the fast poce of contemporary li.

-from
Wth

the Educator's Guide-Speok To Me, Walk

lives. I wanted to discuss art. At Lasalle in the early days, the teaching tended to be more about technique. At the Artists Vittage, there were artists who had returned from training overseas, with whom we could discuss about all kinds ofart, including social art and the Green Movement in Europe. This was in the seventies and eighties. At the time, Tang Da Wu's work was atl about the environment."

Me1

There were no bean sprouts, but there was chatting. More accurately, on zr March zorz, we had an

informal two-hour interview. Surrounded by unpacked artworks from her retrospective, we sat at a table with two teacups, a teapot, and a recorder,
Amanda's studio was warm, but not unpleasantly so. Soft light came in from the windows. Outside

"ln the eighties and early nineties, the institutions

were not quite established. Their ideas about visua[ arts stopped at the traditiona[ paintings and scutptures. The Art Councilwas involved with traditional paintings and sculptures. There was

there were the occasionat sounds of birds.

ln this same studio, more than zo years ago, Amanda began to study drawing, printmaking, and casting. This space, which was once a primary school

little understanding of the needs for aft spaces and exhibitions. They may have set up funds and other
forms ofsupport, butthe poticies and procedures were based on the traditonal arts. Artists trying to develop new forms of expression were mostty not

o
The nest
hallway.
n

Amanda Heng!

(Photo: Stephen Black)

o
Amanda Heng in front of her studiq zorz.
(Photo: Stephen Black)

Singirl in Loro ng Buangkok (on display at SAM 8e). (Photo: Stephen Black)

sA'271

art & desgn

f55

regarded seriously by the institutions. So, being outside of the offcial art world, there was a [ot of room for experimentation, There were no rules. We had an open field to find out what we needed for our own devetopment. Those were the good otd days."
The National Theatre pops up in our conversation.

in Xiamen, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Amanda

mentoned other co[lections, including one about the culture ofthe Singapore River. She described a pair of footwear made of recycted tires. Her imagery
was so real I could atmost see the sandals, the

constructon sites in which they were worn, and

the red-hatted Samsui women who made them.

At SAM8Q, Worthy lours bore the caption: "Singapore: A Passionless Culture Barren City?" Worthy lour was a piece about her homeland, but one of Amanda's most noted works is about
her own home, specifically her mother.

Amanda enjoyed the place and, in the late sixties, she was one often students representing her school in the Youth Festival. They performed the peacock Dance. She mentions Goh Poh Seng, the first chairman of the National Theatre Trust. He also ran a pubtishing company, was vice-president ofthe Arts CounciI and se[f-funded a fnancially disastrous David Bowie concert, A doctor, he wrote a book of poems called Bird With One Wing: A Seguence of poems and tf We DreamToo Long, considered to be Singapore's first novel. He envisioned turning the Singapore River into

"Knowing my mother becomes o necessary process of finding my own identity and values . . , memory and history have to be re-addressed critically, especially

with restaurants and shops; he wrote proposals to the government to make it happen.
a destination alive

in the forming of new beliefs and values in our lives."

-from an interview of Amanda Heng titled "The Art of Engagement in Everyday Life"2
With Another Woman (1996), Amanda presented an extremely intmate piece; amongst other elements, there were photos of herself and her mother, both naked. The biographical/autobiographicat documentation associated with the "domestic" piece is the equivalent of watching an explosion filmed in slow motion: one sees strong hidden forces at work.
Amanda's mother had no opportunity for a formal

"l heard Goh had a pub that was open to writers. This was when the government was strictly against long
hair. The threat

ofthe

ISA was

real and Operation

cold Storage had happened just a few years earlier. Those people were sti[[ in prison. coh got tired ofthe
restrictions and left for Canada." Amanda poured more tea. "Those were very dffcult times . . ." Uncertain of what she reatly wanted to do after graduaton, she had frst worked in the tax bureau, then as a tax agent for an internationat company. With littte nterest, she witnessed the huge economic booms and busts ofthe seventies, a time when everyone was talking about shares. Government sloans and campaigns were everywhere. "t felt reatty tired." She quit herjob and travetled throughout southern Europd.
Our conversation leaped to the 2006 Singapore Biennale and Amanda's Worthy Tour Co. (S) pte Ltd

education, She started taking care of others from survived the war, got married, and then, in accordance with Chinese custom, began taking care of her husband's parents and his siblings-as wetl as the nine chi[dren of her own. All of this in an impoverished Singapore, where "nation
a young age. She

buitding" effectively banned all Chinese diatects.

"The worst thing to do to a person, is to deny them their language and mother tongue, because embedded in the language are their cultures, betiefs, and values; language is a person's soul; something they are proud of. This country betittted diatects and faited to understand its values. Things were changed overnight and att ofa sudden, mother and the otder generation were not supposed to use ther own dialect to talk to their chitdren. "Of course people continue to use dialect but there

rthy Tour Co. was a "travet agency" that offered a tour of Singaporean cultural relics cottected
Wo

(zoo6).

by individuat Singaporean collectors, inctuding extremely rare tropical bonsai, collections of Ming and Qing dynasty paintings, as we[[ as Chinese fi[m scripts for movies in Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, and Teochew for movies made from the r96os to 198os. These treasures, unwanted by the Singaporean government, were welcomed by, and are now exhibited in, various museums and institutions

..i

. .,. . . l;,. ;li:,rJ").,',,

sA.271

art & design

157

was a stigma. You were looked down upon . . . Your

When S/HE was performed again in tgg5 and tgg6, the work took on new meanings . , . the diferences in these two cultures can be advantageous for me , . , t have learned how I could embrace these two streoms of thought and make them my strengths. rhis realization gave me gret confidence in appropriating language, text, symbols ond images from real li, my personal memories and everyday experience , . . Soon, tlre image evolved. I had my head covered,

own culture was downptayed and everything from the West was good. Young peop[e tried to avoid dialects.
Even the way we eat was affected. How can you become a centred person when the language ofyour parents sudden[y becomes something almost illegat?"

The Singapore government not onty took the language of Amanda's mother, they took the famity vittage she, Amanda's immediate fami[y, and about 1oo

relatives lived in. "l never experienced living as a nuclear family until our house in the village was taken by the state. We were not the only one. lt was a big issue of that time, many places were claimed for developing HDB ftats. But places like orchard Road and Bukit Tmah were rarety affected."
Where we drank tea was once the home of Women in the Arts, Singapore (WITAS)-a collective started by Amanda, together with a group of woman artists in 1999. When she found out that she was the only woman artst offered a studio in Telok Kurau Studios, she decided to open her studio to all women artists once every month, for artist's talks and the exchange of ideas. An archive for women artists was eventually set up and is stit[ housed in the studio. The WITAS website was launched in zoo3.

walking and searching for the audience with a stick in one hand and a lantern in the other, with the full blast of Chinese clossicol music ond western
choir playing simuftoneously n the background,

Sometimes, these elements chollenged or commented on one nother; for example, in my use of baking doughto wipe away the marks on my face as I recited the Confucious fsicJ soyings: "When you are at home, obey your father; When you are morried, obey your husband; When your husband dies, obey your son." I then threw away the dough with great

force as a symbolic and visual rejection of these traditionally accepted roles for a Chinese woman os o subservient subject to the men in her life,
an interview on the Fronklin Furnace website: -from Amanda Heng - "S/HE: PERFORMANCE ART"3 The material world, from its smallest intimacies to

Amanda is both pteasant and frank. She smiles with a direct gaze when she expresses hersetf.
On

its [ongest cultural traditions, has been the focus of

Amanda's work up to the present. ln our conversation she talked about future projects, expressing the need to distance herselffrom Singapore and what she has done. "ln a way I am trying to figure out how

Art

o
Singd Revisits

t-Long

Fu

Coffee Shop (Telok Kurau Road/joo Chiat Place) exhibit. (Photo: Louis Ho)

"Today I don't see many artists' initiatives . . . funding is usually the first thing that comes to mind in our conversations about art projects nowadays." ". . . the government is overwhetming. Policies overlook every aspect ofyour [ife, including art-makng. The point is that the individua[ has to be aware ofthis and make decisions about how you want to work with it."

the criticality, the spiritual, and poetic can att be made significant in my aesthetic and practice."

o
Amanda Heng at the opening of her retrospective
(Photo: Stephen Black)

time had flown; I had nrore questions but they would have to remain unanswered. I took a simple portrait of Amanda outsde of her studio, then moved into the hallway for another.
The

"Watch your head, be carefuI ofthe nest," she said.

"l stit[ cherish the hope that there are people who
are more civic-minded, who are witling to take socia[

Amanda Heng, Let's Chat, photo documentation of time-based installation with performance event at
Feas exhbition, Singapore

respnsibitity to make life better for people and socety. Especially the intetlectuats and academics, they are the people who are capable, who have the knowledge to understand and explain life
issues. I think ofsomeone like Ghandi, or Dr. Sun
Yat Sen or Aung San Suu Kyi, or

Art Museum, 2ooo, artist

collection used with the permission of the
Singapore Art Museum,

the Nobel Laureate

turned to see a collection of leaves, paper, rags and string. Earlier, I had thought it was an artwork. As we watch, a bird landed on the ragged suspension. Oblivious to us, it poked its head in and out of the nest. We glimpse a tittte beak. Lke the themes found in Amandat oeuvre, this was a very small part of tife, yet one flled with the creat Beauty of Truth. t
I

Professor Muhammad Yunus. I aspire to create the

possibitity ofchange by tatking, by teading peopte

o
Video capture f rom Water
s

politics,2oo3 (Photo:

to discussions, to discuss issues with ctarity and to examine poticies and how they affect us. Peopte have to learn to engage in discussing pubtic poticies.
The government cannot make decisions on policy

Educator's Guide-Speok To Me, wolk wth Me was a u orr publication by the Singapore Art Museum. The guide was produced in conjunction for Cultural Medaltion wnner Amanda Heng's career-[ong retrospective.

Stephen Black)

o
Video capture from

without engaging in discussions wth the pub[ic. don't have to be a politician to discuss potitics."

You

fhe interview by Kaimei Olsson Wang was from a publication for the zoro Future of lmagnation
6 lnternationaI Performance Event Singapore.

documentation of Amanda
v

isits the TAV (T he Artists'

Amanda found her artistic voice in S/HE, in which she confronted Eastern and Western imperialism, and the sexism found in both.

3.

illage) Exhblton (zo o8) (Photo: Stephen Black)

V

re

http://www.fronklinfurnace.org/research/ lte d/caa/amo nd o _he ng / he ng. html