The ideas I develop in my works have a broad thematic range. These many times include gender based issues, question themes such as the expectations on sexual behaviour, the struggle to achieve happiness, or the perception and reconsideration of social values in general. All are linked to the subject and its position in society. Being an artist I also question the attitude towards art itself and its value in social contexts.
In my work I many times use humorous, ironic or even sarcastic elements. I also take advantage of different types of media to present my ideas. They range from video and painting to including new media. Lately, however, I have been shifting my focus to the body and performance.
David Theobald is a video artist who creates animations structured from rendered objects, photographs, scanned images or single frames extracted from video footage, blending these together to create a familiar yet alien environment. These may be structured as conventional films or as continuous loops with no discernible beginning or end.
Described as ‘one of Singapore’s leading video artists’ by curator Dr Eugene Tan, Kai Syng Tan is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, curator and art educator. She is an insatiable tourist-consumer-hoarder who scavenges the surrounding clutter of signs/noise; as a compulsive editor she chews up and re-maps the found fragments into densely-layered works that question our ‘realities’ of the here and now.
Be it installation, short films, text or performance, Kai Syng’s work is fiercely personal but always at a critical distant, with an urgency laced with self-reflexivity. Her work has been shown in more than 40 cities, including the Guangzhou Triennale, Biennale of Sydney, ASK Gallery in Tokyo and the ICA in London. Kai has also won several awards and grants (San Francisco International Film Festival New Visions Video Merit award, Young Artist Award, The Most Promising Young Artist Award at age 18, Merit Award at the Philippe Charriol Painting Competition at 17), and has a large permanent video installation in a subway station in Singapore, commissioned by the Land Transport Authority.
