Recipient of the Curator Open Call 2024
Hope you are keeping well!
Curated by Lenette Lua
Featuring artworks by Arabelle Zhuang, Genevieve Leong, Hu Rui, and Huijun Lu
Hope you are keeping well! reflects on the impact of Singapore’s national productivity agenda on artistic labour, with a particular focus on the Smart Nation plan and the 1980s Productivity Campaign. Comprising an exhibition and a series of informal gatherings, the project approaches curatorial work of care as a means of revealing and understanding the often-invisible labours of artistic production. Transforming Objectifs’ Chapel Gallery into a shared, psychological artists’ studio, the exhibition synthesises four propositions on care by artists Hu Rui, Genevieve Leong, Huijun Lu, and Arabelle Zhuang. The informal gatherings aim to broaden and deepen the discourse, probing the values encoded in our words and actions. Featuring programmes such as a dialogue with artist Ezzam Rahman and open studios, these gatherings create a space to imagine how we might journey together sustainably, thriving within—and beyond—Singapore’s pursuit of excellence.
Press
Excerpt from ‘Hope you are keeping well!’
Art & Market, 17 Feb 2025
About the Curator
Lenette Lua is a practice-led researcher and curator whose interests delve into reconciling the contested intersections of political, economic, and socio-cultural spheres through her curatorial work. While at the Royal College of Art in London, she initiated the long-term curatorial project ‘Fungi Initiative,’ exploring institutional collaborations via participatory artist-led workshops. She was the recipient of the Objectifs Curator Open Call 2024 Award.
About the Artists
Arabelle Zhuang is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, moving images and textiles. In her practice, Zhuang examines the interpersonal relationship, beauty in the peripheral and the cyclical nature of being. She is interested in developing narratives that search for the multiplicities of everyday life and the layers in between.
Ezzam Rahman is a multi-disciplinary artist known for his interest in the body and the use of common, easily accessible, yet unconventional media in his art practice. Working across sculpture, installation, digital media, and performance, he creates works that are often autobiographical, time-based, and ephemeral, aiming to pique viewers’ thoughts on the themes of body politics, identity, impermanence, traces, and abjection. He was awarded a joint winner of the Grand Prize for the President’s Young Talents 2015 and the People’s Choice Award by the Singapore Art Museum. Ezzam won the Most Promising Award for photography at the PULSE Awards 2021. He served as artistic director for The Substation in 2021 and was involved in various prestigious programmes, including the NIE Visiting Artist Programme and NAC Our SG Arts Plan launch event.
Genevieve Leong‘s art practice attempts to visualise the intangible. Beginning with the immaterial, her work often combines text, image, found and made objects and the manipulation of space to create what she describes as “an almost physical image”. The installations that she creates often embody an impermanence with possibilities for change, whether it be due to audience participation or natural environmental factors. Her work seeks to shed new light onto her emotions, sensations, and realisations.
Hu Rui works with videos, installations, and computer simulation. His practice engages with issues around temporality from a multitude of variables, including causality, prediction, choice, and language. He is the recipient of the Best Experimental Animation Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival and a Jury Special Mention at the 25FPS Festival Croatia. He is an Assistant Professor in Computation and Design at Duke Kunshan University.
Huijun Lu works at the intersections of art, music, engineering and computing. Lu’s practice culminates in kinetic installations, sculptures, moving images and soundscapes. Consistent in the works are mechanisms and circuits that examine the function of objects, observations about the unnoticed in our environments, and technology’s role in mediating relationships with our surroundings.
About the Mentor
Jason Wee is an artist and a writer. He’s the author of four poetry books, most recently From A (Undesirable) Diary and the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize finalist In Short, Future Now. His art is recently seen in The Institutum, the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Angkor Photo Festival, and the upcoming Changwon Sculpture Biennale. He is the 2023 Asymmetry Foundation Scholar and a 2024 Mercator Artist Fellow at Humboldt University Berlin. Curated projects include: The Measure of Our Dwelling: Singapore as Unhomed (ifa Berlin & Stuttgart, 2015), Stories We Tell To Scare Ourselves (MOCA Taipei, 2019), Koh Nguang How: The Past & Coming Melt (Grey Projects, 2019), Walk Walk Don’t Run (islandwide Singapore, 2021 & 2023).
About the Designer
Vanessa Ban is a designer and educator with over a decade of experience working with cultural institutions and commercial clients. She is the founder of External Assessment Summer School, an interdisciplinary educational initiative that bridges art, critical theory, and design. Vanessa has served on jury panels including D&AD and The Crowbar Awards. As an adjunct faculty, she incorporates her professional expertise and critical design approach honed through experiences at Pentagram, Typography Summer School New York, and the London College of Communication.