This year, 2 artists are featured: Fiona Koh and Foo Hui Wen. 

 

FIONA KOH 

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Fiona Koh (b.1994) is a visual artist based in Singapore. She received her BA(Hons) in Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, awarded by Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017. She has been participating in art fairs, group shows and commissioned since graduation and she is currently represented by a gallery from India. Fiona specialises in oil painting and she works largely on newsprint.

 

Fiona’s practice largely deals with lived experiences and identity, deeply influenced by her memories and the everyday in Singapore. Her works often include mundane and overlooked subject matter, forcing the viewers to look at the subject in a new light.  Her paintings on newsprint from the series “The Fishmonger’s Dream” serve as a memory marker and narration for her identity as she tries to “preserve” them. Newspapers were a cheap yet convenient method to wrap and preserve the freshness of fish purchased at the wet market, now a lost practice that is familial and idiosyncratic to her.

 

Fiona had won the Harper’s Bazaar Art Prize Painting Category (2015) with her painting “Hardship of Happiness” and a finalist of Sovereign Art Foundation Student Prize (2016) with her painting “Family Season.” Her participation includes group shows such as Harper’s Bazaar Art Prize at Robinsons The Heeren in 2016, Singapore Contemporary Show in 2017, Affordable Art Fair 2017, The Working Capitol 2017 and Art Move 2017 by LASALLE and The Connoisseur Concerto (TCC). She was also recently mentioned in The Straits Times, Life, “Wall of fame for emerging artists” in November 2017.

 

 

FOO HUI WEN

 

Foo Hui Wen (b. 1997) is currently a multidisciplinary student at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore pursuing her Bachelor’s Degree, specializing in painting. She is a part time teacher at Global Art and has done an internship with renowned Singapore photographer Robert Zhao in 2016.

 

In the series “Artification” Hui Wen’s work investigates the theme of artificiality through the visual and conceptual nature of natural history illustrations; a fusion of true observation and artistic license along with theories of science and art in specific eras. Hui Wen investigates the aesthetic process and physical alteration of goldfish into a commercial commodity. Fascinated by the beauty and strangeness of goldfish, she uses their qualities to picture how one can embrace the mutations and naturalise them into a criteria for beauty. The types of goldfish that are most preferred, with the large round crowns on their heads, set the standards that one uses to classify and create a distinction between the desired and undesirable.

 

Hui Wen won the Winston Oh Travelogue Practice Award (2017) with “The Line Between Where Myths Lie” and the 22nd International Design Trend Concours, Korea Society of Design Trend (2017) with “Artification”. She also participated in group exhibitions such as “Calendula” at the Esplanade Annex Theatre and “ANOMALO(US)” at the La Salle Show.